Comments on: Which Rich Internet Application Technology will dominate?

By: Phil Leggetter

Phil Leggetter — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 09:33:21 +0000

I've a feeling that the people that wrote this Adobe Flex v Microsoft Silverlight Celebrity Deathmatch style post (and then somebody continuously tweeted at people with a link to it) are on the side of Adobe Flex. The more I work with Adobe Flex the more I think that Microsoft are way, way ahead with their development platform.

By: Duncan

Duncan — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:59:28 +0000

I’m interested in HTML 5…
I think if you can do most things natively then it’s better… if Flash is still the best delivery for video so be it… I agree that there shouldn’t really be the need for a vendor plug-in…
Maybe Microsoft should just Opensource the whole Silverlight platform….
And what about mobile?? what is the state of the Mobile RIA?
MRIA??

By: Phil Leggetter

Phil Leggetter — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:31:52 +0000

@Rob - some good points.

if you restrict web development to those that can afford Visual Studio you won’t gain dominance

Microsoft do offer a free version of Visual Studio so this isn't as restrictive as you would believe. They have also started the BizSpark and WebSiteSpark initiatives to give developers access to excellent developer tools for no up-front cost.

it’s a very web dev centric stance to assume a dev environment will be a dominant factor in determining take up

My opinion on this is that most of the big success stories of recent years, such as Mark Zuckerberg and all the founders of Twitter, have been technology and development centric people. The developers have the opportunity to prove that a technology can meet customer expectations and not the other way around. A customer won't say "Oh, I don't like this Silverlight thing". They may say "I find this user interface really clunky". That will ultimately come down to technology capabilities and developer ability.

So instead of writing silverlight clients for twitter, why not try your hand at some dev tools for HTML 5 and Javascript?

If HTML 5 was supported by all browsers then I may well look into this. I'm working on a real-time Twitter solution during my R&D days with a few colleagues at Caplin and the front end will be an Ajax solution. The problem with Ajax at the moment is the support for cross domain access to web services and the development environment. Don't get me wrong; I think I'm a capable Ajax developer but I think that the level of difficulty will make others try Silverlight and Flex first.

By: Rob

Rob — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:12:37 +0000

I remember having the same conversation with a colleague 12 months ago, he was very excited about Silverlight, and was convinced it was set to dominate the world. Silverlight won’t dominate the web, it will fail, and largely for two of the reasons you mention above.

Successful web technology is native to the web, browser agnostic and plug-in independent. The web as we know it wasn’t developed by professional web developers, it was developed by people sitting in bedrooms hacking together HTML and Javascript, if you restrict web development to those that can afford Visual Studio you won’t gain dominance. Another note on development environment: it’s a very web dev centric stance to assume a dev environment will be a dominant factor in determining take up, it’s what the consumer wants to experience, and is prepared to pay for, that will ultimately determine take up.

The other issue with ‘technology buy in’, and solutions provided by commercial companies, is they don’t scale – not technically, but commercially (licenses). This is the reason Oracle and SQL Server failed to dominate the market space for databases powering the web, and Apache *still* trumps Microsoft in the server market.

So instead of writing silverlight clients for twitter, why not try your hand at some dev tools for HTML 5 and Javascript?