Where did all the RIAsses go?
November 10th, 2007I am not sure if this was only my perception or if it was true. Around 6 months ago when I was making a desktop application in Java for some client, the whole desktop world was talking about RIAs (Rich Internet Applications). Flash was making buzz with Flex and Apollo (now named Adobe AIR), MS released Silverlight (- aka the Flash Killer) and Sun had to do something too and they announced JavaFX on JavaOne.
The language wars warmed up on blogs and forums, “applets are dead”, “flash is still slow and clunky”, “MS only cares for the money” … I think everybody had a feeling.. “uh shit, If I don’t pick the winning new technology or continue with this old tech I will be left behind while everybody else will be writing declarative MXML and making cool animated and shaded web-apps with transitions in minutes”. The other side of my brain didn’t agree…
So after 6 months… where are the killer RIA apps from Flex, Silverlight and Sun that squish old clunky web-app-wannabes on first sihgt?
November 10th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Don’t forget OpenLaszlo, something that people actually develop in.
November 11th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Yes, OpenLaszlo seems cool but I haven’t digged any deeper to see how it really looks developing in it. If I would need to program a Rich Internet Interface and would want to do it on a higher level - Laszlo would be my first choice to test because whole page as flash is to me total shyte for usability (scrolling + right clicks + open in new tab…etc) and laszlo has dhtml output compared to Flex which of course doesn’t.
Here I was talking about 3 big-company big-bang releases that I think tried to make a lot of fuzz back then but didn’t really deliver - and cant really deliver IMHO as what they offer is more or less some shiny sprinkle that looks cool but adds little value to most of web. Of course it is good if you want to make and online image/video editor for example but this is very little percentage of web use case.
OpenLaszlo I think predates them all by far and I hope is good for what is made for (I suspect web-applications with higher level of realtime interaction)..
November 11th, 2007 at 11:01 am
This post here triggered me to write this post btw