In case you have not been following the development in the field of rich internet application or RIA, there has been a lot of interesting things happening recently. A new battle of the titans is starting and pawns are already on the board.
Yesterday, the leader on the field, Adobe, released his latest offering targeting both the web and the desktop at the same time. A mixture of AIR, Flex, ActionScript, MXML, CSS, Flash, Ajax, Tamarin, Webkit, SQLite and others is already being used and deployed around the globe to create those “rich” applications. I must say that they are quite ahead of every other contenders. Have a look a those samples if you have not seen what it looks like. It is pretty much a flash application with a good development framework behind it.
I had the chance to develop a small application using Flex 2/3 beta. I really liked how easy it was to create some beautiful interfaces and fluid animations/transitions. Being based on Flash must have had a good part in that. The only negative point I could find, is that if you do not build your whole application with Flex, you have to be careful on how you manage those sub applications and how they will integrate with your main application.
In the other corner, you have Microsoft and Silverlight. I think Silverlight was a direct response to Flash/Flex/ActionScript. According to his creator
[Silverlight] is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
When you read cross-browser it means major browsers and when you read cross-platform it means Mac OS or Windows. Still, Microsoft is pushing their Flash alike plug-in based on the good .NET Framework. When Microsoft is pushing something out, you can be sure that you will hear about it.
Right now their main weakness is the fact that nearly no one has installed the plug-in since it is quite new. One of the ways they are trying to get people to install it is by changing some parts of their website to use Silverlight. Since microsoft.com is one of the most visited website, it might convince some. You can also safely bet on Microsoft to include Silverlight as part of Internet Explorer 8 which should also be part of some mandatory update and the next versions of service packs and Windows. They killed Netscape by forcing users on Internet Explorer. They will keep on trying to do the same thing.
In the open source corner, you have Firefox 3.0 with added capabilities for offline applications. It might not be considered rich applications because Firefox might have trouble rendering videos or 3D graphics on his own but it does go with the same way of thinking where online applications will meet offline applications. This freelance website developer can still show you some nice effects that can be done without using any plug-in.
According to some articles, most Google applications will also work offline when Firefox 3 will be released. For users, it means that they will be able to use the same web interface to access Gmail or Google Calendar whether they are online or not and everything will be kept synchronized. For programmers like me, it means we will have access to new toys like Offline Cache, Offline Events and DOMStorage.
No one really knows how it will all ends but it will be quite interesting to follow. My personal bet is on open source with open and free standards.
Comments 3
Please teach the rest of these internet holoiagns how to write and research!
Posted 10 Dec 2011 at 9:06 pm ¶xlFXDP jchvtgmkejhh
Posted 11 Dec 2011 at 4:25 am ¶8fiYDt dyltvoddhxqe
Posted 13 Dec 2011 at 4:35 am ¶Post a Comment