Comments on: “Ajax is now an Endangered Species”

By: My Design Buddy

My Design Buddy — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:39:08 +0000

Remember developers some folks do not have Admin control over their PCs and Installing a plugin is usually a 4 step process (except IE ActiveX) : 1.) Go to Plugin site. 2.) Download plugin 3.) Install plugin 4.) Restart browser.

And most non-savy users are very paranoid about viruses, phishers, and Trojans and are reluctant to download and install something they never heard of before. If Microsoft can work deals with Mozilla, Opera, and Apple to bundle Silverlight like macromedia did with Flash that would help them. I doubt the other browser makers would, but Microsoft does unfortunately have Internet Explorer with the most market share.

A few questions:

I have is Silverlight accessible and easily searchable by bots?

If you need to build web apps to imitate desktop software why not just write desktop software? Most web apps are created to make easy remote access without special software and setup.

Silverlight looks promising but if Microsoft wants it to take off they need developers and users to back it up. Most web developer OSs and tools differ depending on their likes or requirements. Web developers need a cross-platform IDE and it to run on Linix/Unix. The users (web-surfs) should not even notice the technologies web pages are created from.

By: Don Burnett

Don Burnett — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:16:01 +0000

Bundling the CLR with Silverlight was a very smart move on Microsoft’s part. If they had just released the CLR even it would be serious news. This is almost as big as the advent of Java was.

Basically they have the basis for a whole platform here. The language features alone here are amazing. Do you realize how fast IronPython is in Pystone benchmarks and it runs on the PC and Mac and no doubt later on Mono.

A whole platform architecture can be built on the CLR alone. I think you are comparing Apples to Oranges with this comparison you are making to Flash.

I think the commenters on your Blog aren’t being fair about how they tested and aren’t necessarily following requirements to get this going..

Microsoft has two versions of the plug in out, the 1.0 version with NO CLR and the 1.1 version with CLR.. Obviously because of lack of CLR the 1.1 samples aren’t going to work on a 1.0 version of the plug-in and in this case “ALPHA and BETA” are reversed.

The reality of Silverlight applications is they will have a slick graphics layer and because of CLR run hundreds of times faster than HTML/Javascript apps that we use today do.. Plus the CLR works with MANY more languages.

I think you owe it to yourself to look more in-depth at this technology. If you need assistance getting it functional check with Microsoft and any number of .NET developers out there.. I think the quality/value proposition of your work will go up when you start taking advantage of all that’s there..

By: Gabe da Silveira

Gabe da Silveira — Fri, 04 May 2007 21:59:12 +0000

I don’t care how good Silverlight is, I’m not getting behind a Microsoft product that will either a) be left to stagnate as soon as they secure their monopoly or b) be phased out in 3 years when they need to rejuvenate sales with a forced upgrade.

I believe open source is the way to go for long-term viability. It doesn’t progress as fast as proprietary software, but it lasts longer and doesn’t make senseless lateral moves. If I need something beyond AJAX I’ll go with Adobe since they are in less of a position to screw us all over, and traditionally have a much better track record of commitment to quality tech.

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 04 May 2007 17:40:07 +0000

Ajax has been around for a long time. It didn’t just come into vogue because someone gave it a name.

By: pvs

pvs — Fri, 04 May 2007 15:23:37 +0000

“Flash has been around for a long time, yet Ajax became en vogue a couple of years ago. ……It is a plugin. Silverlight is a plugin.”
++i

By: David

David — Fri, 04 May 2007 14:41:07 +0000

Java needs its own RIA offering. I wonder if next week, there will be one announced, at Java One. It would be an easy guess, that MS marketing, wanted to steal some thunder of such an announcement. So I guess I am saying, next week could be an interesting one. Bruce Eckel is now on the Adobe/Flex payroll, so whoever would make that announcement, would be an interesting speaker as well.

By: Rick

Rick — Fri, 04 May 2007 03:17:43 +0000

Silverlight is definitely going to shake things up. Technologically, Flash is way behind on what it offers compared to Silverlight. Ruby,Python, C#, VB, F#, Boo, Javascript all running on the client, but also with the ability to just send up XAML with some standard Javascript.

HTML, CSS, and Javscript are very limited from a technical perspective. I can’t wait to start writing client code in Ruby.

By: charlie

charlie — Thu, 03 May 2007 19:57:09 +0000

everybory forgot svg…
lol

only IE has not yet any svg native support… i don’t care about flash or silverlight, svg is w3c standard… And it works with javascript…

By: Deadmeat

Deadmeat — Thu, 03 May 2007 14:46:25 +0000

Yeah no Opera support yet, so that bites. MS can’t even get their websites properly cross browser. Cross browser for them seems to be IE 5.0 or later.
What are the development options going to be? VS studio and Expression? (ie MS Windows)
I stopped using Flash because it was way too expensive to buy (even the old 30 day demo doesn’t exist for Flash CS3) and running it under linux&wine was a pain.
Presumably MS tools will be cheaper than Flash CS3 but you never can tell. Will there be cross platform development options or is it going to be hand coded xml for the rest of us?

By: scriptkiddie

scriptkiddie — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:57:32 +0000

For the last 10 years M$ has tried to stop the web on its tracks.
Now they want us to trust them?

Nop, we don’t trust you M$

activex was a huge failure
.net on the web is a failure!

By: michael

michael — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:31:28 +0000

@Tom- Opera is coming. @Frank- Miguel de Icaza of Mono fame has already committed to making Silverlight available to Linux by year end. http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9714669-7.html @Peter- Like I said before, eliminating the need for AJAX can't be the MS goal. They've been showing plenty of demos with Silverlight as an extension to existing AJAX techniques.

By: Frank Thuerigen

Frank Thuerigen — Thu, 03 May 2007 09:23:44 +0000

I struggled a long time to have a cross-browser cross-system AJAX platform. I will definitely NOT go back to any MS proprietary software in web development.
There is still a lot work ahead of us to find the most stable and balanced way of doing xhr driven websites. I wonÂ´t let this distract me.

By: jyog

jyog — Thu, 03 May 2007 03:44:34 +0000

Java Blog

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 03 May 2007 00:03:40 +0000

What about Opera? Konqueror?

I’m not a big fan of “cross browser” meaning “3 browsers” and “cross platform” meaning “2 platforms.”

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:24:54 +0000

blah blah blah. Oh no Ajax is gonna die. Smoking some bad hash maybe? Go do a search on what type of languages firms out there are actually hiring for.

PHP, C#.NET and the winner? AJAX. No f’ing way is AJAX dead. hell its just starting to take off. And o f’ing way is “Silverlight” gonna replace JavaScript. JavaScript is waaay more deeply rooted than Flash, RUBY, whatever the hell crap combined. As long as you have JavaScript, you have AJAX. There is no separating the 2.

What would truly be a revolution in web technology? None of the plug-in bullshit. Integrate actual DirectX into the browser so that we can program DirectX commands just like we code HTML and JavaScript. THAT would truly be revolutionary. Until that happens everything else is just the same old shit rehashed.

By: Andy Kant

Andy Kant — Wed, 02 May 2007 23:06:05 +0000

@jcm
.NET on the server is quite a bit different than on the client. It requires a much smaller hit on both CPU and memory than the ever starving Java. Besides, this isn’t the full framework…as of right now, its an even smaller subset than the .NET Compact Framework because Silverlight is meant to be light-weight. The big thing about Silverlight is that it brings the power of CLR languages such as C# (although I hope plan on including System.Collections and System.Collections.Generic at the very least in their subset).

ASP.NET as you said though, does tend to be a bit sluggish.

By: Ed Burnette

Ed Burnette — Wed, 02 May 2007 22:41:43 +0000

Kevin writes:
> With all these DLLs being downloaded on-demand the first time,
> will we end up with DLL hell again? Itâ€™s already a mess with
> the different set of DLLs between 1.0 and 1.1 as Ed pointed out.

For the two dll’s they have in common, the 1.0 beta and 1.1 alpha appear to be byte-for-byte identical. I’m guessing they’ll try hard for 100% backwards compatibility in the future so that version x.y can play any content designed for 1.0 onwards.

By: jcm

jcm — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:29:34 +0000

It’s Microsoft’s old dream to run applications on your computer using the Web (their real dream is to lease Office in such a way).

The problem with .NET is that it’s not lightweight !
It’s even more memory hungry than Java.

For example, consulting an empty page in ASP.NET requires more than 16Mb of memory on the server !

How can you imagine that users will have good experience with a runtime that uses so much memory -as long it’s not integrated into the OS- ? (I purposely didn’t mention that a lot of users don’t use Windows).

Ok, we’ll be able to develop more quickly than ever, but only for niches. That’s so cool !

By: michael

michael — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:56:16 +0000

I don’t think this guy’s blog is the official stance of MS. They’ve been showing plenty of demos with Silverlight AND AJAX techniques being used concurrently. It’s seems like they’re pushing it more as an extension of Ajax, than as a replacement.

By: Liming

Liming — Wed, 02 May 2007 20:47:55 +0000

Even with the adoption of Flash that is today, most of us are still hesitant to implement our applications in flash and in flash only. For small business like us, the safest route is still based within the capabilities of the browsers with NO PLUG IN.

I love silverlight, had tons of fun such far playing with it, but that’s because it offers the programming languages that I’m familiar with – Javascript, C# and later on IronRuby. Having said that, I still don’t see Ajax will be out of the picture AT ALL.