HTML DB and Web 2.0

Question

I started discussing this at
Future direction of HTML DB
I have been doing some reading about this new buzzword Web 2.0 that seems to have sprouted in the last few months. It is all about rich, thin-client Web applications with amazing amount of interactivity and responsiveness.
See
http://www.smartclient.com
http://www.bindows.net
http://dojotoolkit.com/
etc
All this and much more is discussed on the blog at http://www.ajaxian.com
As far as HTML DB is concerned, Carl said on the earlier thread above that 3.0 is going to have features to add more AJAX style interactive stuff in the App Builder in a declarative way.
Thats great, but I think the entire philosophy of HTML DB (Application Builder) might need to change to really meet the needs of creating interactive apps like the ones showcased above. HTML DB has a very robust back-end infrastructure, great security, great show/accept processing, great reporting engine, but it has a really small selection of "widgets" and even poorer layout options. Template based layout is great when you want to have a consistent look and feel but it really goes against HTML DB's stated goal of rapid app development (drag and drop layout would be more in line here)
Would HTML DB 3.0 be able to create apps like the ones above? 4.0? 5.0?
I read on this forum once that HTML DB generates HTML, so anything that can be done in HTML can be done in HTML DB. But these rich apps are so much more than just HTML, they feature such a high degree of interactivity, that entire concept of user interactiion is missing from the HTML DB Application Builder.
To all the non-Oracle people out there, how important is this kind of functionality to you? Do you see a clamour for it today? Are your business users demanding these features? Are they even aware of this?
[Dont get me wrong: As anyone who lurks these forums knows, I am a great fan of HTML DB, I wouldnt hang around if I werent. I started off earlier this year and got some great help from this forum. Nowadays, I find that I have more answers than questions so I try to return the favor and help out when I can. But I cant help but shake the feeling that Oracle has kind of missed the boat on this one, HTML DB is too little, too late. Of course, I would be glad to be proven wrong!]
Closing comment: One of the blog entries was very blunt
"OS itself has a wonderful array of panels, buttons, etc.
Once upon a time there were great tools like Delphi that
allowed developers to take advantage of the operating
system. With Delphi's ability to create single-file exe's
with all dll's being optional, it was quite possible to
build a fantastic thin client app that outperforms all of
this silly ajax stuff, and was MUCH MORE secure. The rush to
web apps seems so silly, when Windows has provided the
ability to do all of this great work for a long, long
time... "
Comments welcome.
Thanks

Answer 1

Scott: Appreciate your input, as always.
No and no. Most business users are simply amazed by
HTML DB in and of itself. Nothing special or
additional is needed to "wow" them. Maybe my experience is slightly different because we just finished deploying Siebel CRM in our organization.
Have you seen the Siebel e-Business CRM software? Siebel 7 runs entirely in a browser and its UI is amazing, just like a desktop application, very responsive and seamless. No Submit button anywhere in sight. No explicit Save, just step off the record to save. Drag and drop to reorder stuff, the list goes on and on.
Contrast that to a traditional thin-client application (be it HTML DB or .NET or ASP or PHP or whatever) and you will see why business users get confused as to why thin-client means so wildly different things.
And Siebel, like a few other vendors, has been doing this for 3+ years now, long before the media attached these fancy buzz words like AJAX and DHTML to it.
I mean, here we are swooning into ecstasy, going Oooh, Ahh over little things like Type-ahead, Autocomplete in text boxes, dynamic select lists when this stuff has been available to business users via (desktop) client-server applications since Windows 3.1 days! With the advent of the Internet era and thin-client browser based UIs, we sacrificed rich application functionality for ease of deployment and maintenability for us (IT folks)! Business users got a raw deal!
[Maybe now that Oracle is thinking about buying Siebel some of that technology will seep over into HTML DB!]
Again, I tend to be more conservative when
recommending that a project use a brand new
technology, but at the same time, see lots of newI fully appreciate the value of stability and security and as I said in my original post HTML DB's back-end infrastructure is rock-solid. Great show/accept processing, insanely fast, great security, just superb.
But this AJAX stuff is neither so bleeding edge nor so unstable as it is made out to be.
Rumour has it that Microsoft's Outlook Web Access team "invented" the XMLHTTP object back in 2001 and many many robust Javascript libraries have been built on top of it. Javascript has been around in browsers for almost a decade now. Yes, industry standards and browser support for CSS still continues to evolve but good toolkits handle this (and cross-browser compatibilty) quite well.
Again, none of this stuff is exactly "new", the underlying components (XMLHTTP, Javascript, CSS, plain old DOM scripting) has been around for years now.
Thanks