Hi,
I'm in the start up phase of a project that should provide a gui
client as one of its deliverables. I argued today for a browser based
client, because there was frankly nothing I could see that meant it
should not be in the browser, the other argument was that it would be
java based because it was required to be cross-platform (which I
pointed out one could expect the browser based client to be as well)

Another argument I put forward would be that we could produce it as a
web based client that would be accessable at either an url or as a web
based client that people could download and install and run as
localhost on a different port than 80.

There are numerous programmer  tools that use this strategy, for
example various databases but I'm aware of only two end user
applications of any major size that have used this approach, the open
source erlang-based J-EAI and Google Desktop . Does anyone know of any
others? Can anyone make any arguments against this particular model
for local clients, arguments for?