Rightsizing Application Development

Jim Louderback makes some good points about rightsizing application development in his PC Week column of January 6, 1997. He defines rightsizing as "developing and deploying an application in the right way, on the right hardware and with the right tools." Mainframes are not dead, client/server is not obsolete, desktop applications are still useful and intranets are not the holy grail.

• When you don't have control over the client operating system, and transactions are small and well-bounded, the intranet model makes sense. The applications should require small amounts of communication, but can be deployed either across many internal servers or to users outside the firewall.
• Applications with heavy transaction loads or bandwidth requirements, reliance on business rules and significant data validation needs are best implemented with client/server and host-based models.
• Desktop and small workgroup applications with small user populations and relatively low data requirements are still well suited to the scripting languages within productivity tools.