Web versus Desktop decision

This article is in English.

You are starting a software project and must decide which user interface to use: desktop (such as SWT or Swing) or Web (using AJAX, Flash or other).

Here are some hints:

Most enterprises decided long time ago to go for slim clients and fat servers, due to the fact that is much more easy maintain code if it is in a server.

Web systems are sessionless by nature. You simulate a session in your server.

Desktop systems can use sessions or not, however using sessions is more natural to them and some widgets available in the market are designed for direct connection of databases.

A system that will run on LANs will probably have very fast and reliable connections to its server. This indicate that you can use Desktop, but does not mandate it.

A system that run on WANs will probably have a lot of network instabilities. This indicate that you should go for an application where the client does not need to keep the connection with the server. This is just the way Web applications work, but it can be done also with Desktop.

This is a tricky question. A client/server system (2-tier) is much faster to develop than a n-tier system, however you need to see that your business need much more tiers.

It is difficult to develop a n-tier system, much more difficult than to develop a 2-tier.

For large systems, it is equally difficult to develop desktop or web, any number of tiers you have.

For small systems, it can be that a web version need more setup, both in xml or code, adding a kind of overhead.

Maybe