A Concept of a Web Application Blending Thin and Fat Client Architectures

Rich Internet applications and Web application frameworks treat user agents as either thin or fat clients. Whereas the former approach does not take advantage of the increasing potential of modern Web browsers, the latter requires the availability of their scripting engine. Although the majority of users allow the source code to be interpreted by their clients, some consider it to be a security threat and forbid its use. Moreover, not all user agents support scripting, thus the requirement of code execution constitutes a Web accessibility issue. We propose an architecture allowing software developers to build modern Web applications with equivalent functionality regardless of whether the user agent supports client-side scripting. The concept eliminates the need to rewrite the code base in a server-side language and requires no customisation of other layers of a Web application.