As the world continues to move towards using software online, the development of Rich Internet Applications is necessarily growing. The problem right now is that the Giants (Microsoft, Sun, Adobe, Google) all have their own solutions to this problem, all of which require that visitors have plug-ins for their browser and that developers use tools provided by the giant. Microsoft is pushing it’s Silverlight technology, which uses Microsoft’s .net framework and uses it’s XAML standard for presentation. Sun is pushing it’s Java technology with JavaFX being an extension that makes scripting and animation much easier to do in Java with Java Web Start allowing users to run the software locally. The company that is currently in the lead is Adobe with their Flash platform. Flash started out as an animation tool but the latest versions of Flash are essentially a full blown programming platform and with their new AIR tool these tools can be downloaded and run locally. Google is not quite as involved in this war as the other three giants, but they do have their Google Web Toolkit and their new App Engine. Part of their App Engine beta documentation is them stating that they are looking into the possibility of having App Engine applications be downloaded so they can run locally.
Maybe it is a sign that I am turning old, but as a developer I am getting sick of all these competing “standards” that I have to follow. Or perhaps I am just sick of hearing fan boys for the giants tell me how their favorite companies solution is the best thing since the invention of fire. For my Blazing Games site I am slightly hedging my bets by having some of my games in Java and other games in Flash but even then have found this too be far too much work. I understand that all the giants want their technology to be the standard. The cost of being on the edge of technology is that you need to deal with issues like having too many RIA platforms. There is possibly an axe on the way in the form of HTML 5 which is suppose to have much greater support for multimedia, but standard bodies move so slow and there is already controversy over which file formats should be part of the standard. Until there is a winner, I just have to keep reminding myself that being on the edge of technology is exciting and hope that there will eventually be one universal solution that will allow my code to work on any browser/internet device.
By Billy D. Spelchan
www.BlazingGames.com
This article was submitted as part of a contest we are having on my podcast.