eBay's Hybrid Applications | December 14, 2006
by Jeb Boniakowski
eBay Technology Evangelist Alan Lewis on Rich Internet Desktop Applications:
I brought up the example of how the eBay category tree, when expressed as XML, is more than 20 MB large. Each eBay site has more than 50,000 categories, and that number grows every month. Lets say you want to build an application that lets users progressively filter (a la iTunes) the list of eBay categories. It would be pretty taxing on the back end to implement such a feature in AJAX. Now with a desktop application, you could download the category structure and cache it locally (something web apps can't do because of the security sandbox), and then in your application it is a fast local data lookup to filter the list instead of expensive remote processing.This example illustrates that desktop applications are good not just for offline operation. In this example having more capabilities, such as the ability to write data to the hard drive, can allow for better experiences, and better applications.
Have I mentioned our new release has web services support lately?
