AJAX Desktops: déjà vu All Over Again - and Again

Back in January I opined that moving to web applications was not the optimal solution to the real problem we have/had with desktop applications. The real problem is installation woes. What we ended up with is a poor UI without installation problems, so we (the software industry) started to resolve problems like we had when we moved from terminals to graphical UIs etc. So now we have Rich Internet Applications (RIA) using technologies like AJAX. But they suffer from other problems which again we've already been through.

Well that was the topic of the post in January. Now I've stumbled upon an interesting/amusing twist -- Adobe Apollo.

Apollo let's you -- yes you've guessed it -- take your RIA applications and deploy them as desktop applications. You can now take your HTML, CSSs , AJAX scripts pack them up as a single file (AIR) and lo and behold deploy them on the desktop. You even get these nifty start menu and desktop shortcuts :).

The reason not to dismiss this as a complete waste of time is that what we actually see here is another example of a trend to convergence web and desktop UI architectures and programming models. I say "another" because coming from the desktop direction Microsoft is doing pretty much the same thing. WPF brings the web-programming model with its markup (XAML) and "code-behind" concepts to the desktop as well as pushing the same model to the browser with WPF/E. You can find more on WPF in Properties, Dependency Properties, WPF, Sizing Up .NET 3.0's WPF, and Windows Presentation Foundation Interoperability.

The difference between Microsoft's and Adobe's solutions is that Adobe is coming from the web-side and Microsoft from the desktop side. Both companies are striding toward the same goal, and what we are left with is yet another technology war.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 08:22 AM  Permalink