InformationWeek

Applications are at the heart of business, and for decades they were painstakingly built and customized by in-house IT personnel. Why, then, the move to browser-based computing platforms? This special report looks at a variety of reasons, including one practical reality: Web technologies are being implemented anyway, so why not leverage their use, streamline development, and save some money?

Justin Fielding, CEO of Apps.com, a site that tracks the Web-apps industry, says Web apps represent "the marriage of software and the Web." Writer Charles Waltner explains that small businesses are the most enthusiastic users of these low-overhead applications, but larger shops are showing interest as well. For example, Nortel Networks Corp. is moving most of its enterprise applications to a Web platform, and Landstar Systems Inc., a $1.4 billion freight-hauling company, is rolling out a Web application for mobile Internet devices carried by 7,300 independent truckers.

It's attractive to think that the cumbersome, time-consuming, fat-client development techniques of the past can be replaced with the Extensible Markup Language, intranets, and application service providers. Of course, there are trade-offs: security, access limitations, and performance are compromised compared with traditional client-server apps. Many IT departments have seen these problems before and won't go where ASPs are leading. Will Web apps work for you? Read on and let us know at the E-mail address below.

Paula Klein
Managing Editor, Special Projects
pklein@cmp.com