If you’re a webgeek like me, you have probably figured out that we are living in some very interesting times right now. Microsoft and Sun made significant announcements and improvements to their new RIA platforms this month, and Sun has released their new JavaFX Script (ok, now really, who came up with that name?)
Given that we’re also about to take the covers off Interclue May 2007 is likely to go down as a month of intriguing events for the future of the web. (BTW feel free to ping me if you want the password to the site, otherwise, add me to your feed reader and stay tuned for Wednesday)
So Silverlight wasn’t open source. Or at least, not in any significant fashion. The big reason #10 that Tim mentioned was in fact the inclusion of a cutdown CLR in Silverlight so that developers have access to a subset of .NET without needing the users to have installed the whole runtime environment on their machines – which is a big win for Silverlight given that the CLR does not have 100% penetration even on windows, let alone on the Mac.
But if it’s not open source, the Silverlight team must have another reason for thinking they have something that will compete with Flash/Flex/Apollo, Ajax, and XUL.
I think what it boils down to is that Silverlight is a way to give their existing developer base a way to migrate their .NET skillset, components, and tools onto the web. So it’s all very exciting if you’re a .NET developer, but less so for everyone else. I can see how it has a chance, because there will be a lot of windows developers feeling that windows applications just aren’t where it’s at these days, and Sliverlight gives them a migration path.
One wonders if this is what Sun has in mind with JavaFX. There isn’t any talk of a cut down JRE to be deployed where the full version isn’t installed, but they have said that there is “more to come” for JavaFX, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this came about. And JavaFX is open source. GPL in fact, like almost everything Sun is doing these days. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it.
Arguably, it will work for Microsoft and Sun in the other direction as well – if web developers start using Silverlight / JavaFX and gaining an understanding of XAML or Swing, that will mean they’re more likely to use them for desktop or mobile versions of the same.
Despite the hype, neither Silverlight nor JavaFX will eclipse development with Flash, XUL, or the various Ajax libraries anytime soon, because ubiquity trumps functionality in an awful lot of cases. But there are certainly tasks for which they will be well suited, and with the massive developer and developer support teams of Microsoft and Sun involved, it seems likely that both these new platforms will grow a significant presence given time.
All this activity by major players has caused a bit of a ruckus in the Mozilla Community, with Chris Messina arguing that Mozilla should focus more on platform (ie XULRunner) development to counter these moves by other players, while Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) among others, argued that the best course of action was to focus on the users rather than the developers, and keep pushing Firefox while it’s on a roll. I tend to agree with her, even though I have this really cool app idea I’d love us to build with XULRunner once our addons are launched and we get some funding (and more staff) for Interclue….
Pssst: Apparently the Mono project will attempt to port Silverlight to Linux.
3 comments ↓
Can’t say I disagree with Mitchell, but there are significant nuances that need to be considered. First of all, I’d never suggest the demise of Firefox (in saying Browsers Are Dead, I’m simply saying that innovating browsers is proving increasingly difficult if you’re expected to stay backwards compatible with IE6 (let alone anything earlier)). In fact, the Firefox flagship application continues to be key to marketing the Mozilla platform; however, that’s where the problem lies.
If you look at Firefox and think, oh man, I’ve gotta build on whatever platform Firefox is built on, you’re going to be sadly disappointed if you’re coming from the Apollo or Silverlight worlds simply because (as was my heaviest criticism) the tools simply aren’t there. I’ve seen very little advancement in terms of tool development for the XUL Runner platform, at least in my circles, and everyone that I’ve talked to who have tried to build a separate app on top of Firefox have struggled to make it work in a consistent fashion, whereas developing for Apollo (at least) will give you consistent, uniform results cross platform, with a suite of established and popular tools from Adobe.
If Firefox is Mozilla’s strategy, that’s fine, but if you want ubiquity, you’ve got to have a better suite of tools that let you keep up with — if not blow by — the competition. It’s entirely possible that I’m missing something and am ignorant of what’s been going on; but the complaints that I’ve heard about the XUL platform persist and suggest that, at least with some folks, my complaints are justified. The conversation that has followed is worthwhile at least, so we’ll have to see where it ends up.
Hi Chris, thanks for stopping by. I should clarify that when I said ubiquity I meant “runs on all operating systems” or “runs on all browsers”, rather than “lots of developers using it”.
Essentially you want your platform to be available on as many operating systems and browsers as posible – wherever you think you might find users.
But on the other hand it’s really important to have a lot of developers using your platform/language *as well*, and as you point out, to acheive that you really need good tool support.
To which I would add good documentation, a roadmap, and members of the core team actively blogging and engaging with the development community.
Essentially as an entrepreneur with a product to build I want to know that there will be developers available to work on it, tools, documentation, community and official support channels, that the platform support will be good enough at launch point and get better as time goes on.
Marketing and distribution support, these days, is pretty optional, but Microsoft/Sun/Adobe clearly have an edge there.
Silverlight is Ruby and Perl programming for Safari and Firefox and IE – from Microsoft; why they aren’t trumepting that bit from the rooftops I’m not sure. It will hit mobile phones – Windows Mobile then Java/BREW. You can build something like the new Popfly service, or a video editing tool – really impressive apps if they were on Windows, but they’re RIAs. It does move laggard .NET and VB developers to the Web; the end of JavaScript’s hegemony can’t come a day to soon for me!
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