Serving as the User Interface for a Business Application
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Written by Atila on September 23, 2008 – 9:56 pm
A user interface (the screen display that accepts user input and displays system output) is needed for any computer system that communicates with people. Every time we visit a web site, we are interacting with that site’s user interface, also called the front-end. A traditional computer business application, such as for entering customer charges or keeping track of inventory, typically uses a graphic user interface, or GUI (pronounced “goo-ee”). The interface is built in to the application software that actually processes transactions, and is usually hand-built by the programmers along with the rest of the application. A browser user interface, or BUI (pronounced “boo-ee”), communicates with the user through the browser while the back-end business application (business logic on the server) uses standard programming languages like Java, C++, or even COBOL to interact with the underlying databases. The signifi cance of a BUI is that a business application not typically delivered through the web can still use a browser to provide its user interface.
In the future, the most ubiquitous deployment of web technology may well be in BUIs, not for public-access web sites, for good reasons:
- A browser has all sorts of built-in facilities for buttons and forms and such that can make coding a user interface easier and faster than in the typical GUI environment.
- Browser-based technologies such as HTML are fairly easy to learn. That ease of learning is not necessarily true for the programming languages and environments used to build GUIs.
- Web sites must be as agile as the business itself, so that they can be updated quickly and easily for competitive advantage. Again, because HTML is relatively straightforward, HTML-based interfaces are easier to update than standard GUIs.
- BUIs are portable. If we code a site wisely, its pages will display properly in all of our target browsers, on any operating system. On the other hand, most programs written in standard programming languages must be at least recompiled and perhaps even rewritten to run in each different computing environment.
- BUIs don’t need to be downloaded and maintained on every user’s PC, as many standard applications require. Instead, only a single copy is required the copy on the web server that all users access.
