Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX - Who cares?
It seems every Blue Chip and his dog is announcing a post Web2.0 RIA development tool these days. Adobe has Flex (aka Flash), Microsoft has Silverlight (aka ActiveX), and Sun announced JavaFX at JavaOne last week (aka Java applets). Now even Firefox is making noise about how Firefox will have features designed to go head-to-head with Flash and Silverlight! (I had hoped browser builders had learnt their lessons about proprietary browser tech in Browser War I…)
To me, this just seems like a bunch of old ideas repackaged with new Web2.0 marketing spin. It’s difficult to find developers genuinely excited about all this. Most of the noise seems to be coming from the big companies themselves.
Browser plugins have been dead for a while now. Java applets were never really that good to begin with and died shortly after birth. ActiveX kinda faded away due to security problems and cross-browser incompatibilities. Flash is still around, but really only used for (annoying) movie trailer sites, obnoxious web ads, and YouTube. It’s surprising that these ideas are being dredged up again and touted as the Next Big Thing.
It will be interesting to see where these platforms go. My guess is that they’ll fade into irrelevance before long due to developer apathy (users hate plugins as well, but thats another post). The main warning sign is that most of the noise out there at the moment isn’t from excited bloggers writing "Check out this cool Foobar app that I wrote in Silverlight/Flex/JavaFX!". No. Mostly the blogosphere is talking about press releases with an occasional overview of the technologies at a high level. No killer apps (or even mildly dangerous apps), no new possibilities that weren’t there before. Just promises of more of the same, except a bit easier and whizzier, and with video content (as if the only thing stopping every 2nd developer launching the next youtube was the current technology…). All done with a corporate designed feel and colour scheme. There just isn’t the grassroots enthusiasm there. That has to be grown organically. Not built by a marketing team.
These platforms are all trying to emulate and replace Ajax. The current usage of Ajax wasn’t engineered. It almost happened by accident through a combination of new uses of existing tech, new ideas, and realisation of new needs. There was no big bang product release, or big marketing campaign, or corporate backing. Just a grassroots momentum that built on its own due to developers seeing value in the technology and users enjoying the results. It helped that the mum and dad users didn’t have to install any additional plugins to use gmail or youtube as well.
Realistically, I think Ajax will be around for a while. It’s just that it’ll get easier to build as new supporting technologies are developed. The tech to watch are the ones that have a slow rumbling build up, then exponentially grow to a roar due to the passionate developers actually getting real value out of them. Look where Rails, Ruby and dynamic languages were a couple of years ago, and you’d find a few fanatical supporters that were passionate about it just because they could see the value. Look where Erlang and other functional languages are now and you see the same thing. They are the ones to watch. The technologies with the slow groundswell of support rather than the hollow big bang spin fest.