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When Microsoft renamed WPF/E into Silverlight it was just a re-branding news. But yesterday’s news requires some serious attention. Microsoft has announced SilverLight 1.1 Alpha.
Here’s the quote from asp.net :
“Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications.”
If Silverlight 1.0 Beta was about XAML GUI with the business logic written in JavaScript, now a new runtime called Dynamic Language Runtime will be used for the RIA deployment, and the fun part is that you’ll be able to create these applications with any of the languages mentioned above. This is really breaking news. The new runtime will weigh about 4Mb (Flash Player 9 that holds two VMs weighs 1.2Mb), and expected seamless installation time is under 30 sec (similar to Flash Player 9). JIT is also there.
While Java community is discussing which language features to include in the heavy tank of the future called Java 7 , their main competitor provides support to multiple languages. JVM is a very powerful but underutilized machine, and it’s about time to run more than just tried and true Java there.
Now Adobe has to respond to Microsoft with some secret weapon besides Apollo. If I were running Adobe RIA division, I’d pick up the phone and dialed the number of Jonathan Schwartz.
“Jonathan, what do you think of this crazy idea – let’s see if we can run some trimmed down version of Java in Flash Player 10”.
With the introduction of Silverlight 1.1, there are now four major RIA
platforms available: Flash/Flex, AJAX, Applets/Java WebStart, and now
Silverlight. Flash and AJAX currently have a strong advantage in
percentage of browsers they currently support, but I would not be surprised
to see Silverlight make progress rapidly over the next year or two. Seems
to me that the Java GUI technology will get crushed in the market by these
three other development paradigms. Putting the whole JDK into Flash 10
seems unrealistic. Really makes the arguments about what should be in Java
7 seem out of touch to where technology innovation is going.
I've published the same blog at our company's site:
http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?p=189
and Jonathan Schwartz promises
some surprises at JavaOne.
But what if Microsoft stops supporting Flash in their browser?
Interesting idea, but if Adobe did interpret/JIT a subset of Java in the
Flash runtime, it wouldn't be Java; instead it would (of necessity) be an
ActionScript with Java syntax.
