AJAX Chat about FLEX, MXML and XUL, SVG | December 29th, 2005
There’s two great interviews by Alexei White up on AJAXInfo.com with some leading minds in RIA. Christian Cantrell, of Adobe, discusses the future of Flex2 and MXML in Adobe’s technology stack as it applies to Enterprise RIA. He finished with giving us a hint of something for the future:
One thing I think Ajax developers really need to keep an eye on is Adobe`s new project which we`re calling Apollo. Adobe is a very big believer in a universal client which will let developers leverage HTML, Ajax, and Flash consistently across platforms.
Sounds interesting and I can’t wait to hear more from Christian on this.
Next Alexei caught up with Kurt Cagle to chat about XUL and SVG and how they might play with AJAX. Kurt talks about “XGULFs – XML Graphical User interface Language Frameworks” and includes XUL, XAML and MXML in there. I’m particularly interested in what the future holds for the XUL vs XAML battle. Although, I don’t have high hopes for XUL given microsoft’s market dominance. Kurt says:
Is XUL market-ready now? No, though its not far. It needs a better toolkit for production, needs a real IDE, MUCH better documentation, and a decent body of literature.
I’m guessing adoption of all these RIA technologies will be slowed somewhat by AJAX given that it’s here now and “good enough”. I’ll talk more about that later though.
December 29th, 2005 at 11:09 pm
Made up acronyms aside, there are some inaccuracies in the Kurt Cagle article:
1) Mozilla is planning on improving its SVG support only Firefox 3.0 (not Firefox 2.0 as Kurt mentions)
2) Safari is implementing SVG through the KSVG (Konqueror) plugin, not through Canvas experimentation.
3) Andre calls it the “Mozilla Canvas” element but it was introduced by Apple, not Mozilla.
December 30th, 2005 at 12:53 am
Jeff,
Thanks for those points, I’m no expert in either subject…do you have links to these topics so we can follow up with more research? Maybe we’ll hear more from Kurt on this. Also, in your 3rd point are you referring to Alexei? I didn’t ever mention Canvas in my blog post.
Thanks for reading!
Andre.
December 30th, 2005 at 4:39 am
Jeff,
I’m aware of the roadmap, though I have my suspicion that there may be strong enough lobbying to get SVG moved into the 2.0 roadmap (I know I plan to lobby Brendan intensively on this issue).
Safari IS going through KSVG, but I was given to understand that at least some of this would be built upon the same framework that Canvas currently utilizes (which may or may not be KSVG). I’ll bow to your likely greater knowledge on this front, however, as I have few contacts at Apple.
The canvas element was definitely first included in Safari, and was then proposed as an extension defined within the WHATWG mandate before being included by Mozilla.
– Kurt
December 30th, 2005 at 1:26 pm
Kurt,
I hope you’re right about lobbying Mozilla, because I for one am quite disappointed in the current SVG implementation, feature-wise and performance-wise, though I realize they have to start somewhere. Anyway, I don’t relish waiting for over a year to see any improvement. I will be sticking very close to Opera 9 (which I suspect will be released very soon) as the best native implementation out there.
And it is probably I who should bow to your likely greater knowledge – I only know about Safari’s SVG work from what I’ve read on their blog/wiki and since you didn’t mention KSVG at all I thought maybe you were uninformed.
Andre,
Right, I was referring to Alexei’s mention of “Mozilla’s Canvas”, not yours. Just providing some input to other readers out there
Thanks,
Jeff
/Andre,
I w
December 30th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
And here are some resources:
1) Tentative Roadmaps from Mozilla. Gecko 1.9: http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap/gecko-1.9-roadmap.html and Firefox 2.0/3.0: http://cbeard.typepad.com/mozilla/2005/11/mozilla_product.html
2) SVG+Webkit page: http://wiki.opendarwin.org/index.php/WebKit_plus_SVG
3) Canvas element Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_%28HTML_element%29
December 30th, 2005 at 10:10 pm
Yeah.. mozilla canvas.. sorry about that. If I knew it all I wouldn’t have to ask Kurt :). I’m going to post a note at the end of that article about that. Thanks for pointing that out.
.. And thanks to Kurt for answering so many questions that potentially expose him to criticism. Hey it’s just good journalism!
May 16th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Here is a new ajax powered free chat http://chantlive.com