2 - Rich Internet Applications

Posted on 10 Dec 2007 at 10:59

You probably first heard that "next year is the year the internet will take off as an application platform" back in 1995. Of course, the promise of the Java revolution - moving away from the Microsoft-dominated local desktop to the platform-independent, networked internet - largely fizzled out when end users spotted that the much-hyped Java applets couldn't do much. Next year, though, really will be the year of the internet as an application platform...

With the Flash platform that it acquired with its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe has inherited a near-universal, web-efficient and, crucially, design-rich interface. On to this it's grafted serious development power in the form of a new programming language, ActionScript 3, and a dedicated IDE, Flex. With the upcoming Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), it will become possible to run Flash and HTML-based applications both online in the browser and offline on the desktop. Moreover, with platform- and browser- independent players and runtimes, this time there's little Microsoft can do to stop its rival.

The only viable option is to try to produce a superior equivalent, and that's exactly what Microsoft has been working on. With its XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language), Microsoft has devised a modern mark-up language to handle rich, web-orientated design. A subset of this design and media-handling power has recently been made available via the new cross-platform, cross-browser Silverlight player. Early next year, with Silverlight 1.1, Microsoft will move onto the crucial next stage when it builds in a subset of support for its .NET languages.

Built on Flex/Flash/ActionScript/AIR and XAML/Silverlight/.NET, next year's Rich Internet Applications should be as good-looking and powerful as their desktop counterparts. And with the two main desktop software developers behind the shift and other interested parties such as Google and Mozilla looking on, this time the revolution - or rather evolution - looks unstoppable.

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Author: Stewart Mitchell