Silverlight’s shine reveals AJAX’s dark secrets
With the launch of Silverlight, Microsoft has made web application development exciting again. I feel like a Hollywood gossip columnist when I say this but Web 2.0 has not been aging well. The first Web 2.0 conference was held 3 years ago. Jesse James Garrett coined the term for Web 2.0’s enabling technology, AJAX, 2 years ago. Counted in Internet time these events are ancient history.
Our ADSDAQ portal is a state of the art Web 2.0 application using AJAX to bring you the best user experience possible in a browser. But the ugly little secret of Web 2.0 user interfaces is that they are a pain to develop and maintain. AJAX isn’t so much a technology as it is a collection of cleaver hacks and workarounds. Our web designers and programmers put a tremendous amount of effort into compatibility and consistency. Sure, there are a couple of AJAX code libraries out there but they are not integrated with our development and testing tools. This lack of coherent tools is the main reason why today’s web apps often don’t work very well. When Digg tried to update its comment system with AJAX the result was universally panned–Not because the Digg programmers don’t know what they are doing but because AJAX makes the easy hard and the hard even more difficult.
The main competitor to AJAX has been the browser plug-in, the most successful of which is Adobe’s Flash Player. (I won’t even talk about Java Applets–I wasted too much time back in the late 90’s with them.) Flash Player is also long in the tooth and recent attempts to update it is for Web 2.0 development (Adobe’s own Flex and Laslo Systems’ Laslo) have been met with mixed results. I’ve found Flex and Laslo to suffer from the same sorts of complexity and compatibility issues as AJAX. With Flash easy things are easy to program are easy but hard things remain difficult.
Silverlight is a new crossplatform brower plug-in that provides a true web application development platform and it just might break us out of the AJAX rut. Like Adobe’s Flash Player technology Silverlight enables programmers to create rich Internet applications (RIAs) with sophisticated user interfaces. Drag and drop and a host of other cool UI features can be created with elegant C# code using modern object oriented techniques–not the slippery HTML and JavaScript mash ups that AJAX requires or the weird ActionScript syntax that Flash/Flex requires.
Microsoft’s Silverlight will integrate directly with Microsoft’s VisualStudio tools, .NET 2.0 runtime environment, and C# programming language. This integration will make it possible for a small development team to build very complex web user interfaces very quickly.
I’ve seen this happen before. In the early days of desktop UI programming when the Mac OS was black and white and Windows windows could not overlap, programmers had to use a variety of technologies, tools and clever techniques to create even the simplest graphical application. Within a few years Alan Cooper fathered the Integrated Development Environment working with Microsoft. Suddenly the hard work of programming a rich user experience got a lot easier. These days just about anyone can slap together a highly functional Windows application in a few hours. Sliverlight’s integration with Microsoft’s development tools mean that building Web 2.0 applications will get a lot easier as well.
Now before we get too excited about Silverlight I have to admit the current plug-in crashes on my Mac’s web browser and the integrated development environment is not available just yet. But I believe the competition between Microsoft, Adobe, and the legions of AJAX developers out there will make for much better Web applications in the near future–maybe we’ll even get to Web 2.1!
Related Silverlight links: ArsTechnica, Read/Write Web, Don Dodge, BT Broadband Office, Tim Anderson, Channel 9, TechCrunch, MSDN Blogs, Duncan Mackenzie, MossyBlog, Silverlight Fan, Today is Fire, ScottGu’s Blog, Rev2.org
-- John Pavley
Sphere It
September 17th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
[…] John Pavley over at contextWeb captures some of what I think about Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications with his post on Silverlight. The post is a bit fanboyish (I thought the link to the Google search for “Flash development problems” was funny) but I think he’s worded some of the issues with Web 2.0 and Ajax very well. One of the most controversial quotes is this one: “AJAX isn’t so much a technology as it is a collection of cleaver hacks and workarounds.“ […]
September 17th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
Can’t say I’ve evaluated Silverlight, but Adobe has done well to give Flex as a tool to produce Flash that is actually much more intuitive to programmers, rather than designers. Also, the complexities and hacks which comprise AJAX’s dark side are to abstract away the subtle differences in the behavior of the XHR object - in the case of Flash - that player/plugin no longer requires such hacks, for it’s the same on all systems. I’m curious what is “hard” and what is “easy” wrt the Flash development referenced here. Without even being familiar with Silverlight, I’m wondering why I didn’t hear this page play an Angelic “ahh” as I got to the “enter Silverlight” part - that should’ve been an easy thing to embed, right?
September 18th, 2007 at 10:54 am
Adobe has made great strides with Flash/Flex and most of my RIA application experience has been working on OOP ActionScript single frame movies and trying to build working Flex applications. But I find the devil in the details has not been exorcised by Adobe. I’ve been jealously watching my .NET buddies using a fully integrated platform with excellent tools for awhile now. My thinking is that Microsoft has the experience and expertise to do what Adobe has not been able to do so far: Create a true RIA platform good enough for high volume B2B and B2C application.
October 1st, 2007 at 7:51 am
It’s not at all clear to me why Silverlight is a big stride forward. It’s simply Microsoft’s response to Adobe’s dominance with Flash. Flash is now installed in over 99% of the browsers, and has recently been open sourced. Additional technologies like Flex and AIR are pretty exciting moves in this space. Not saying that Adobe is perfect, but I just don’t think that Silverlight is such a big advance for Web 2.0.