Smart Client/Web Client Redux Picking Up the Pace

Last month I briefly mentioned Ajax moving to the desktop (with Adobe Apollo) and the whole Rich Internet Application (RIA) movement.

Now that Microsoft WPF/E Silverlight has been announced, we see that Sun is also jumping on the RIA bandwagon (or was that Reo Speedwagon :) ) by announcing JavaFX. JavaFX is a new Java scripting language which aims to take over JavaScript, Flex, Groovy and Silverlight by building on Java popularity. One thing that is going for it is that JavaFX is open source while Silverlight and Flex aren't (Thanks J E Fritz for pointing that Javascript has at least one opensource implementation (Mozilla) and reminding me that Groovy is also Open source).

Generally speaking, more options is a good thing, but as always it also comes with a price (see, for example what Otaku Cedric has to say about it).

Anyway, as I said in the previous post we are going around in circles and resolving problems we already solved with Rich Client. The good news is that at least the cycles are shorter and it seems we are getting decent development environments faster.

Also as it seems the boundaries between rich clients and web client are getting thinner we can hope that in a few years it will really be a non-issues. But then, we'll probably think of something new.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 04:41 PM  Permalink