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It is safe to say there are two types of the forms that business organisations use, forms that are internal and forms that your propects, clients or Web Site visitors are asked to complete.
There are a number of technologies to choose from implementing any kind of form or document based solution.
Focussing here on forms that are accessed via Internet Explorers' browser we can divide them into two distinct types; they are either Web forms or a Windows form.
Smart client technology enables Windows forms to be delivered across the Web into your Internet Explorer.
This means regular looking desktop Windows forms open up inside your desktop bowser instead of a Web page.
The idea behind such forms is to enrich the client experience with a better richer user interface.
Generally speaking the problem with Web forms on Web Pages is the same problem associated with web page itself.
Namely it has to reload and rebuild the page when the user clicks on a button, this can be quite slow and is always boring.
Smart client base technology avoids the necessity to rebuild and refresh the screen every time a user clicks on a button, thus making the entire experience and much smoother.
There are a few deployment issues surrounding smart client technologies.
They require the use of being Internet explorer that’s, secondly they also require that the client has the .NET framework installed on their PC, again thats cool as most XP based PCs’ do have .NET installed by the manufacturer. Thirdly they run in a sandbox, meaning they really should be digitally signed and can involve administrators getting their heads around security policies, again all fairly straight forward but not as smooth as some would prefer.
Now they are wonderful, I built my first smart application in 2003, it’s just that the take-up had been very slow so far and now we have something newer that has completely changed the browsing experience without the need for anything extra on the client side, (except the browser that is). To the user they work in a similar fashion where you just point and go as always, except this time the Web pages and Web forms do not have to reload, rebuild and refresh when users click ona button.
This is both smart and smooth; it is called Atlas by Microsoft or Ajax by everyone else.