AJAX Alternatives review of AJAX, XUL, XAML, Flash and SVG for RIA | August 31st, 2005
Weighing the alternatives a great article by Alexei White on the pros and cons of different and competing RIA technologies. Alexei does a great job of giving a high level overview of AJAX, XUL, XAML, Flash and SVG as competing technologies in the RIA space. Possibly he could’ve gone into a bit more detail on how some of these technologies can work together and are not necessarily exclusive. Maybe that’s an idea for a follow-up article Alexei:-)
One of Alexei’s points is very important for a lot of our corporate customers:
“Ajax offers something else too. It`s a way for web developers to leverage their current skill sets to achieve the first goal: build better applications. JavaScript and DHTML aren`t new, and more importantly: corporations are loath to acquiring 3rd party software components that use technologies their in house developers have no skills with. It doesn`t make business sense to jump into technologies that have rarefied skill sets unless you have to because it`s expensive to be retraining your employees or outsourcing development work to specialized consultants. “
Another point I’d add to this is that HTML and JavaScript have been around for years and are exhaustively tested open standards. A huge trust factor for enterprises that have been burned by new “promising” technologies in the past.
Technorati Tags : AJAX, XUL, XAML, Flash, SVG, RIA
October 13th, 2005 at 3:27 pm
also.. JDNC such as roomity.com for RiA.
.V
December 1st, 2005 at 11:01 pm
The line between AJAX and markup languages, such as XUL and XAML, is blur. ZK, an OSS Web framework, illustrates the way to using XUL on any browser, not limited to Mozilla. More details at http://zk1.sourceforge.net and live demo at http://www.potix.com/zkdemo/userguide
January 4th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
RIA’s are for me the natural evolution of the web interface. Though I find the discussion interesting on the language of how to accomplish this I think the best way to implement on a wholesale basis is to abstract this discussion. At Iokio we use .swf as our delivery vehicle and a very simple windows based application to “make the magic happen”. You don’t need to know Flash or Java or anything else. It’s simple and has mass appeal for design and application. My perspective is that if we get people to ninety percent of the RIA dream by giving them simple toolsets the other ten percent will be accomplished in the same manner Google took ubiquitous search and simply made it better. I’m betting that once users create an RIA within minutes (by using our FeatureFinder product) and experience the amazing step up they will never look back. Furthermore, they will also have the data they need to fund the months necessary to create the custom awesome application. (Like the ebay.uk “pressie picker”). Have fun! This is going to be a great year for RIA’s.
January 22nd, 2006 at 9:35 pm
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