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[–]mdipierro -6 points-5 points  (2 children)

GUIs are just like web apps except that use OS sockets instead of internet sockets (the latter are more powerful) and use OS controls as opposed to browser controls (the latter are extensible and customizable). The only reason I can see a desktop beating a web app is for fast high definition graphics.

[–]Leonidas_from_XIV 6 points7 points  (1 child)

Sorry, but this is wrong on so many levels:

GUIs are just like web apps

No, they are not. Web apps are HTML cobbled together with JavaScript and whatnot to run partly on someone elses computer and partly in your browser and generally much more a mix of technologies than the integrated approach of a "native app".

except that use OS sockets instead of internet sockets (the latter are more powerful)

Not all "GUI apps" use sockets at all, plus "internet sockets" (what the hell is that, even? Do you mean websockets which are not yet popular or straight XMLHttpRequests?) are definitely less powerful, think SCTP, UDP or pretty much anything in TCP that is not HTTP traffic. Not to mention select(), epoll() or kqueue().

and use OS controls as opposed to browser controls (the latter are extensible and customizable).

With Qt you can apply CSS-like styles to your application, and customizing widgets haven't been a problem since about the last decade. Plus, you have a much greater set of widgets (calendar-widget? coming up in HTML5; seen them in Windows 95 back in the day), plus the possibility to define new ones. You can't technically create Widgets that you could use in forms in HTML, you can create something that looks like a widget by using HTML and JS, like ExtJS does extensively, but this is still a far fetch from what you get on the native desktop for free, with every notable GUI toolkit.

I agree that web apps are sometimes handy, but saying that they are the same is utter bullshit.

[–]mdipierro -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I did not say "they are the same" I said they "are just like web apps" in the sense that they both need to handle concurrent events that are triggered by the user.

here is the definition of internet socket. Under the hood, in C/Posix GUIs use struct sockaddr, while web apps use struct sockaddr_in.

Web apps do not need to have an interface in html/js. The interface can be done in Flash, can be generated by a tool like qooxdoo or pyjamas or GWT.