I am working on a GPS data logger and Map viewer application using Microsoft Azure.
I am gathering data through a TCP Worker Role endpoint and storing the received data in tables.
The latest GPS co-ordinates should be viewed on Google Map. Assuming to have a high speed Internet Connectivity, which of the below two is effective with respect to cost, speed?
1) Develop an Azure website which reads data from the table and displays the map.
2) Develop a Windows application which gets the data from the table and displays the map. (Not sure on how to do this yet. Please guide regarding the communication protocol and desktop Google maps.)
I am considering the second method, just to ensure that the there is less computing in Azure and will result in less cost of the application.
Please post your views.
I think you are asking whether you should build the viewer as a web app, or a desktop client app?
Edited to add about how client communication would work: You don’t want the clients connecting to your database directly, it’s a HUGE security risk. You’ll need a WCF service running in Azure for clients to connect to, and execute the queries on their behalf.
Doing a desktop app isn’t likely to save you any more money on Azure either. The bottleneck to scaling will most likely be the database queries, which you have in both the website and the WCF service. The presentation layer (HTML pages) for the website is likely to not be very taxing relatively speaking.
But there are a couple things to consider:
Fetching the data. The website can query the database directly, and show the results to a user. The desktop app is going to need to connect to a WCF service, which will query the database, to grab the latest GPS data. So in terms of Azure instances needed, it’s still the same. WCF services are also more difficult to code, and seem to be far more fragile (in my experience at least).
Ease of development. This is probably a serious point of contention, but web apps are much easier to develop than desktop applications. You have the entire MVC framework, jquery and all it’s plugins, a wealth of resources for ASP.NET, CSS, etc. Client side you’ll be building a lot by hand, you’ll have to deal with installers, update mechanisms, testing on all Microsoft OS’s, etc.
Support. Web applications can be updated with a single deploy to Azure. Desktop applications will need an update plugin added, you’ll need to maintain a repository of versions, support old clients, never be sure users are updating software, etc.
Cross platform. If you build it as a desktop app, how are you going to support mobile clients? You can build native mobile apps, but that’s even more work to start. Going to port it to Mac too? With a web application and following standards, you can cover 99% of the world (I made up that number).
There’s probably hundreds of other reasons why I’d prefer a web application over a native Windows application.