preface

My background is in client application development. I started on the Commodore 64 in seventh grade in the 1980s, later moved to DOS with dBase, QuickBasic, and C++, and eventually Windows programming using C++, Borland Delphi 1.0, PowerBuilder, Visual Basic 3-6, and .NET.

Though I've written plenty of pure HTML/JavaScript web applications, I've always preferred client programming over strict web programming because I felt HTML/JavaScript programming treated the immensely powerful PC as a dumb terminal, squandering its CPU cycles for applications that were almost entirely network bound in performance. Only recently is this changing.

Back when web applications started to become more popular, customers loved the flexibility of the blank canvas ...

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