Excellent comment supporting Kontra's prescient point of view. Web Applications are going to divide into two camps. One camp will be that of Web 1.0 - Web 2.0 "designers" moving to light weight RiA. This is very much a "consumer Web" orientation. The other camp will be that of the "business Web", where legacy client/server applicaitons will be re-written to RiA-SaaS-Cloud computing models. Here, Microsoft has an extreme advantage. MSDN developers have spent near 20 years building "client/server" related services around the client side MSOffice-Outlook-Access anchor. Today it's hard to think of client/server without also having to think MSOffice. Even though it can and will be argued that many client/server applicaitons have migrated to some sort of WebStack portal-CMS footing using J2EE.
This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Sep 2008, by Gary Edwards.
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08 Sep 08
Gary Edwards"What’s good for the Internet is good for Google, and the company says its strategic proposition for the newly introduced Chrome browser is: a better platform is needed to deliver a new generation of online applications......."
This is one of the best explanations of why Google had to do Chrome i've seen thus far. Kontra also provided some excellent coverage concerning the Future of the Web in a two part article previously published. Here he nails the RiA space, comparing Google Chrome, Apollo (Adobe AiR/Flex/Flash) and Microsoft Silverlight.
Chrome is clearly an Open Web play. Apollo and Sivlerlight are proprietary bound in some way. Although it must be said that Apollo implements the SAME WebKit layout engine / WebKit docuemtn model as Google Chrome, Apple Safari-iPhone, Nokia, RiM and the Iris "Smart Phone" browser.
The WebKit model is based on advanced HTML, CSS, SVG and JavaScript. Where Adobe goes proprietary is in replacing SVG with the proprietary SWF. The differences between JavaScript and ActionScript are inconsequential to me, especially given the problems at Ecma.
One other point not covered by Kontra is the fact that Apollo and Silverlight can run as either browser plugins or standalone runtimes. Wha tthey can't do though is run as sufing browsers. They are clearly for Web Applications.
Chome on the other hand re-invents the browser to handle both surfing mode AND RiA. Plus, a Chrome RiA can also run as a plugin in other browsers (Opera and FireFox). Very cool.
The last point is that i wouldn't totally discount Apple RiA. They too use WebKit. The differnece is tha tApple uses the SquirrelFish JavaScript JiT with the SproutCore-Cocoa developers framework. This approach is designed to bridge the gap between the OSX desktop/server Cocoa API, and the WebKit-SproutCore API.
Chrome uses the V8 JiT. And Adobe uses Tamarin to compile JavaScript-ActionScript. Tamarin was donated to the Mozilla community.
If there is anythin that will slow down Apple and Google WebKit implementations,-
Add Sticky NoteAgree with much of what Kontra said and disagree with many who mentioned alternatives to JavaScript/Chrome. The main, simplest reason Adobe will be in a losing fight in terms of web platform? The Big Two - Google and Microsoft - will never make themselves dependent on or promote Adobe platform and strategy.
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Add Sticky NoteLuis, I think that’s already in play with HTML5. As I pointed out in Runtime wars (2): Apple’s answer to Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX, Apple and WHATWG are firmly progressing along those lines. Canvas is at the center of it. The glue language for all this, JavaScript, is getting a potent shot in the arm. The graphics layer, at the level of SVG, needs more work. And so on.
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I agree with Kontra that SVG is hurting the WebKit gang. But i would also point to the lack of a XUL like alternative to Microsoft XAML as another problem tha tmus tbe overcome.
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