hi, has any body used this Visual Web Gui , and are their claims right ? i have been reading on their site and it seems amazing that you can make Web/Desktop App in same time, plus they say you don't have to worry anymore about update panel, AJAX, it is all on the server, plus they have wrappers for 3rd Party controls.
i mean all in all it looks theoretically great, but what about reality ?
thanks in advanced.
I have an inherant distrust for any product that claims it will do all of my work for me. Frequently, that means 1 or two things:
That said, I have never used this product and cant really give an opinion beyond my own suspicions.
We have a production commercial software application that was built using Visual Web GUI.
We could not have built this system using a traditional stack like aspx. Our web site is http://www.hrtms.com
VWG is best suited to a line-of-business applications.. not Web 2.0/bouncing ball/youtube/video or social networking types of apps.
Here is what we have learned: 1. Don't try to scale to 1000s of users.. there is a server-side statefull component for each user, so intuitively, this will limit the number of users compared to a traditional application that is stateless. 2. Best used for Business applications with lots of complex business rules and data (definitely ours!) 3. Best for applications that can use the standard look and feel that comes with VWG.. so you really can't build Facebook with it. Most VWG apps look like Outlook. 4. Of course you must use .Net stack
On the positive side: 1. You can knock out a huge amount of your system very fast... since the framework is based on the Winform model. You do need to handle modal forms differently, but for the most part, the code looks and feels like winform code.
The network traffic is minimal.. once the client has downloaded the javascript engine the network is just used to post commands and data.
Stateful programming on the server for web apps is far far easier that stateless. You can load complex object trees and know they will be there when the user is interacting with you system..
No more agony working with html/javascript/css. VWG maps it according to the browser being used.
Ok, on the negative side: 1. Scalability.. you need to plan on throwing lots of hardware at these apps.. I figure about 200 -300 concurrent users per box. Good news: hardware is cheap.. 2. Until 6.4 comes out, we are still dealing with pesky version problems with some browsers... so the support beyond IE right now is not 100% 3. Silverlight plugin support is on hold right now.. they want to support that when SL stabilizes.
Overall.. its a great tool. There's no magic.. Its a smart ajax app.. Try it out.
By the way.. i am not an employee or agent for this tool.
Mitch
Visual WebGui doesn't "do everything for you" but it makes life much simpler for developers by allowing the, to concentrate on one layer instead of many by applying productive desktop (VB6) methodologies to a web/cloud framework.
In addition, it allows the flexibility and extensibility in case there are special needs so you are not limited to any patterns. It is also announced that Visual WebGui will soon allow to apply XAML programming within the framework for experienced web developers.