Simon’s Blog

The world of the Rich Internet Application (RIA) just took a couple of fascinating turns.   Silverlight version 2 is now out in beta; and it looks… well it looks TOTALLY AMAZING.  It can be programmed using serious, elegant, programming languages; it has great tool support; and a version of Silverlight is coming to mobile phones soon.  Nokia will be the first mobile manufacturer to support Silverlight.

Frankly, Silverlight 2 and associated tools are starting to make Adobe’s Flash/Flex offerings look kludgy and amateurish.   There was more bad news for Flash today when Steve Jobs appeared to distance the iPhone from Flash, saying that Adobe had no version of Flash available that offers the right balance of functionality required to deliver a compelling end-user eperience on iPhone.   Whether Adobe will make a special version of Flash for iPhone, I don’t know.

Now, the work Sun Microsystems is doing on client Java makes it look like Java could compete seriously with Silverlight 2.  Java has many of the fundamentals right (just as Silverlight 2 does); but it won’t be until the JavaOne conference at the beginning of May that we get to find out where Sun is up to with the Java RIA story (Java 6 Update 10, JavaFX Script, JavaFX Mobile, JavaFX Designer tool etc).   The big question will be whether Sun has yet done enough to make Java a serious player in the RIA world again. Be in no doubt, though, Microsoft’s offerings in this area are looking seriously impressive today.  I can see Silverlight getting lots of developer mindshare during the next few months.  It wouldn’t be a total surprise if Apple wasn’t looking seriously at Silverlight 2 for iPhone, given that Jobs has seemingly now dismissed both Flash and Java support for Apple’s mobile phone platform.

Now having said all this, all of Flash/Flex, Java, and Silverlight have a variety of strengths and weaknesses from both technical and business perspectives.  No-one has won the RIA battle yet. For sure, there will be plenty more twists and turns in the RIA story before this all plays out…