Adobe Ships Flex 3; Microsoft Shines Light on Silverlight 2
"We find that our customers want desktop apps that are robust," said Rajesh Radhakrishnan, VP of Business Development with Vritti, a Mumbai-based technology solution provider during an interview at Streaming Media Europe in London last November. "They use web applications as client access to content, but keep the two applications separated due to security concerns and difficulty in creating rich web applications. Putting the core application on the web raises several security concerns that clients would need to be educated on."
"RIAs may look rather sophisticated, but you don't need to be an expert Flex, Flash, or Adobe AIR developer to build one," a recent blog posting on Adobe’s OnAIR site says. "You can build RIAs using a variety of tools, techniques, and technologies, such as Java, Ajax, or even HTML. In essence, you can build and deploy your RIAs to the desktop using the tools, technologies, and development models you employ today when developing for the browser."
The biggest benefit that AIR possesses, though, for the streaming media crowd, is the ability to push video content down to the desktop; with Adobe pushing its Adobe Media Player (AMP) out to the desktop as an example, Flash Video content can be streamed or downloaded the desktop, the latter being a first for content owners seeking to tap into an offline market for Flash Video playback.
Microsoft Casts a Wider .NET
Not be outdone, Microsoft is touting upcoming advances to its Silverlight technology, which pushes back at Flash’s web dominance and provides a way to move desktop applications to the web. According to a blog post by Scott Guthrie, who’s on the Silverlight development team, Microsoft has heard one of the primary issues that Silverlight developers had with content creation: the need to use Windows for .NET development.
"Silverlight 2 includes a cross-platform, cross-browser version of the .NET Framework," said Guthrie, "and enables a rich .NET development platform that runs in the browser. Developers can write Silverlight applications using any .NET language (including VB, C#, JavaScript, IronPython, and IronRuby). We will ship Visual Studio 2008 and Expression Studio tool support that enables great developer/designer workflow and integration when building Silverlight applications."
While some of the biggest enhancements for Silverlight 2 will be in the programming and user interface framework (Silverlight 2 will have a Windows Presentation Foundation-based UI framework that makes building rich web applications much easier), the skinning, animation, and streaming media tools will also be improved. This should bring Silverlight into the position of a formidable competitor to Flash.
"We want to enable developers to re-use skills, controls, code and content to build both rich cross browser web applications, as well as rich desktop Windows applications," said Guthrie.