ICEfaces Offers a Novel, Pure Java Approach to the Rich vs. Thin Dilemma

hen it comes to their GUIs, distributed applications have always observed a pendulum effect. The early enterprise distributed application comprised a heavy centralized server with a dumb terminal for data entry. As the personal computer evolved, the model changed; increased power at the desktop led to heavier and more sophisticated client applications. But the need to maintain such high computing and presentation power on the desktop led to a huge increase in the costs of deployment and management of such applications.

When the Internet, and in particular, the Web browser came along, the pendulum swung back toward a centralized model with a thin client. While this certainly helped with the cost of managing large scale systems, it came at a cost—that of user experience. A Web-based application, designed and implemented in HTML, cannot match the user interface experience of a desktop application. Various add-ons to HTML, such as JavaScript, can improve the experience, but these solutions can be onerous and expensive.