Question

I’m sure this has been asked before, but I can’t find it.

What are the benefits/limitations of using a browser-based interface for a stand-alone application vs. using a normal GUI framework?

I’m working on a Python program currently implement with wxPython for the GUI. The application is simply user-entry forms and dialogs. I am considering moving to PyQt because of the widgets it has (for future expansion), then I realized I could probably just use a browser to do much of the same stuff.

The application currently doesn’t require Internet access, though it’s a possibility in the future. I was thinking of using Karrigell for the web framework if I go browser-based.

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Edit For clarification, as of right now the application would be browser-based, not web-based. All the information would be stored locally on the client computer; no server calls would need to be made and no Internet access required (it may come later though). It would simply be a browser GUI instead of a wxPython/PyQt GUI. Hope that makes sense.

Answer 1

The obvious advantages to browser-based:

• you can present the same UI regardless of platform
• you can upgrade the application easily, and all users have the same version of the app running
• you know the environment that your application will be running in (the server hardware/OS) which makes for easier testing and support compared to the multitude of operating system/hardware configurations that a GUI app will be installed on.

And for GUI based:

• some applications (e.g.: image editing) arguably work better in a native GUI application
• doesn’t require network access

Also see my comments on this question:

Cross-platform GUIs are an age-old problem. Qt, GTK, wxWindows, Java AWT, Java Swing, XUL — they all suffer from the same problem: the resulting GUI doesn’t look native on every platform. Worse still, every platform has a slightly different look and feel, so even if you were somehow able to get a toolkit that looked native on every platform, you’d have to somehow code your app to feel native on each platform.

It comes down to a decision: do you want to minimise development effort and have a GUI that doesn’t look and feel quite right on each platform, or do you want to maximise the user experience? If you choose the second option, you’ll need to develop a common backend and a custom UI for each platform. [edit: or use a web application.]

Another thought I just had: you also need to consider the kind of data that your application manipulates and where it is stored, and how the users will feel about that. People are obviously okay having their facebook profile data stored on a webserver, but they might feel differently if you’re writing a finance application like MYOB and you want to store all their personal financial details on your server. You might be able to get that to work, but it would require a lot of effort to implement the required security and to assure the userbase that their data is safe. In that situation you might decide that the overall effort is lower if you go with a native GUI app.