Comments on: Silverlight vs Apollo vs Ajax vs XUL vs JavaFX ? Good grief.

By: Mary Branscombe

Mary Branscombe — Tue, 22 May 2007 07:34:40 +0000

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!

By: sethop

sethop — Mon, 14 May 2007 03:11:49 +0000

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.

By: Chris Messina

Chris Messina — Sun, 13 May 2007 21:30:30 +0000

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.