No subject

I've thinking on your conversion task and suddentlly recalled something Alan
cooper wrote some years ago, circa 1995. It's in his book "About Face". He
wrote about the migration of programs from DOS to Windows and mentions
specifically the Lotus 1-2-3 case and how it lost it's market dominance in
the move to the GUI. Basically the idea is that you can't "convert" a
program but instead you have to build a new one. He says that a Windows user
expects a Windows program and not a DOS program in a Windows envelope. I
think that the same can be said of the migration of a program from Windows
to webapp.  Trying to fit what you already have into a new media might
impair the former program's ability to perform or be usable, specially if it
was designed to fit closely the application model of the former plattform.
Cooper speaks from an experienced standpoint and that's why I think that his
counsel has to be taken seriously (the book is otherwise outdated and a mix
of tech and theoretical features).

I had an experience. Once I started migrating a couple systems that worked
very well in DOS and other terminal-like plattforms to Windows. The programs
are (still) VERY usable.  To make it easy I wrote a COBOL to Visual Basic
translator working many hours a day during several months. When I started
testing it I realized that it was completely useless: the structure of the
original progam was so totally different of the desired structure for the
new one that translating was impossible.  In fact I could translate, but
only to get the same program, which is useless.

And as always, I talk only about business systems. Other web uses, like for
example nice pages, are out of my scope.

If you can (I still ignore the type of your application) maybe "Java Web
start" is the technology that can most behave like a desktop app while
remaining web enabled. JWS is a standard feature of Java and in the
java.sun.com site there are lots of examples. Look in
http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/sightings/ for several dozen examples
you can run in your computer (PC, Linux, Mac, QNX, ...). Write me if you
want more details.

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