I have received an email from a Visual WebGui user how wrote me the following question: “how can you say that you should not use DHTML, while Visual WebGui does not support FireFox?”.
Well it is true Visual WebGui currently does not support FireFox. We are currently in the process of making it working over FireFox. The great thing about programming applications over Visual WebGui, is that you are actually using an abstraction layer. This means, that when Visual WebGui will support FireFox, application developed using Visaul WebGui will also support FireFox with out modifying there code. Further more bugs and improvements made to the presentation layer of Visual WebGui also will applied to existing projects.
Generally this is usually the meaning of a framework. It takes care of things for you, but here applications get all there presentation layer enjoying the advantages a framework. Normally when you develop an application you improve only stuff you have to improve but with Visual WebGui, you get a presentation layer that keeps on improving without you having to use your resources.
Visual WebGui abstracts away more than just what browser you use, it also abstracts the communication between the browser and the client. This is one hell of a feature when you consider the complexity of developing a simple application such as the explorer sample (see the video here). Currently developing a web application means developing services that are consumed by javascript code in the browser. You have to determine which way fits you the best and you have to develop, consume and integrate those services together. I have seen companies creating frameworks specially designed for there type of data and there type of needs and abstraction layers in this area usually come as RAD tools that do a great job at telling you what you want to do, instead of the other way around. Visual WebGui's abstraction layer does not assume what you want to do and still it has optimizations that makes applications developed with Visaul WebGui better than custom developed application using the existing tools.
Desktop programmers have been enjoying this kind of abstraction layer for ages. Other than creating a custom owner drawn controls, they never had to worry about how to render a list view or how to get data from the controls to the screen. They did not have to understand, how does events get to from the keyboard to the application code. The did not have to write funny looking document oriented language (HTML) to create their apps but rather use docking and anchoring. These are the things that make web application development so complex. Why shouldn't web application development be as simple as developing a VB or WinForms application ?
I think in star trak they would end this post by saying... Abstract me away scotty...