A history lesson
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
This post from Joel Spolsky offers a very prescient view of AJAX applications. We are currently seeing a flood of open-source Web 2.0 SDK's which all make developing web versions of applications easier and easier.
However, I also find myself wondering if a true winning SDK is going to appear that offers something truly unique, truly compelling, which will allow it to become the de facto standard that all web applications will use. That will be the one all developers will need to know, that will grow by leaps and bounds.
Usually it takes a large company to evangelize a new tool kit. I started writing commercial applications when Windows 3.0 was going out the door and Microsoft did an amazing job of encouraging WinSDK development. With more applications on Windows came more users and, ta da, Microsoft got huge.
But, RoR wasn't pushed by a big company but via grassroots, viral spreading. Will something similar happen in the AJAX sphere to push a standard there?
However, I also find myself wondering if a true winning SDK is going to appear that offers something truly unique, truly compelling, which will allow it to become the de facto standard that all web applications will use. That will be the one all developers will need to know, that will grow by leaps and bounds.
Usually it takes a large company to evangelize a new tool kit. I started writing commercial applications when Windows 3.0 was going out the door and Microsoft did an amazing job of encouraging WinSDK development. With more applications on Windows came more users and, ta da, Microsoft got huge.
But, RoR wasn't pushed by a big company but via grassroots, viral spreading. Will something similar happen in the AJAX sphere to push a standard there?
Posted by George
2 Comments:
The trouble with AJAX stuff is that the cat's already out of the bag. There are a half dozen incompatible toolkits, all pretty much offering the same thing (with minor variations).
Anybody who comes up with yet another one is going up against a lot of already entrenched technology. The only way you get a single conforming version (the mythical 'one sword to rule them all') is if a standards body like W3C comes up with it (ok, stop sniggering). Right now that looks pretty unlikely.
The thing is, just such a uniform, cross-browser, cross-platform technology already exists and it's called Flex from Adobe. It's not Javascript, but it does the job.
By
Ramin, at 10:59 AM
we echo the Flex endorsement, and after YEARS of battling competing vendor HTML and CSS "standards" interpretations, we are moving all of our apps to Flex / AIR, simply because we code once for Adobe Flash Player, and it works OK.
Not perfectly, not natively, but the goal is the productivity of our applications for as many users, languages and platforms and form-factors as possible, with minimal TCO for solving - hacking "standards" implementations per browser / processor architecture, and avoiding the serengeti-herd migration towards a continous mudhole of "point-solutions".
So far, Java and Flex have the muscle to make these goals happen, and appeal to different developers. We choose Flex/AIR on Eclipse for the presentation quality and device quantities.
By
jon.scot, at 11:16 PM
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