- Background
- Case Study: Interior Specialists Management System
- Remote Services
- Benefits of Deployment Under Remote Services
- Issues of Application Deployment using Remote Services
- Application Design Considerations
- Application Development Under Remote Services
- Conclusions and Recommendations
- Further Reading
Conclusions and Recommendations
The experience of the ISI project has demonstrated that remote services does in fact provide an excellent alternative to browser-based or installed client applications for complex business systems. The following are some specific conclusions and the recommendations they infer:
Remote services is an excellent alternative that should be considered strongly for any intensive business applications requiring remote access and serving a limited audience.
Remote services should not be considered for casual business applications or when there is any chance that the user base will increase into the thousands of simultaneous users.
Remote services provides many substantial advantages for code development and maintenance. It should be utilized for development teams, regardless of whether or not the solution is intended to be deployed under it.
Remote services extends the lifetime of application development systems such as VB6, allowing these mature tools to continue to be viable solutions for many applications into the foreseeable future.
Unless users absolutely require access to server desktops, all applications should be published in seamless mode. This makes the user experience almost indistinguishable from running a local application, and almost completely eliminates server security and lock-down issues.
Not all features described in this article are available in all remote server applications. Choose a product that provides you the best mix of pricing and features. If in the future an alternative product provides better value, you can easily switch to it because your applications are not designed to depend upon any particular remote services technology.
Given the number of projects in which remote services can provide a superior solution, no decision should be made regarding the architecture of a new business system without considering this alternative.