Nate on Tech

I’ve gotten the question lately, “Is Silverlight going to be a Flash/Flex killer?” and thought I’d just put up my thoughts where everyone can see.

Everyone always wants to see or hear about a “___ killer” (insert popular app/company name). I think that new apps on the market are rarely, if ever, competition-killers - it’s just typical publicity/media buzz. However there are a few things to note about Silverlight:

From a high-level perspective, Silverlight will be useful for companies that already have a Microsoft-focused development team, and are looking to move into developing RIA’s quickly. Apparently both Microsoft and 3rd parties (like the Mono project) are working on bringing Silverlight to other platforms like OS X and Linux. This is an important step, as many designers have historically been the movers behind RIA’s, and typically use macs. (Besides, Linux has been gaining some ground in the desktop market lately, and will most likely continue to do so due to the enthusiasm of that community.)

From a low-level perspective, Silverlight is structured much like Flex and Laszlo are. You have 2 language constructs - XAML for the display layout (compared to MXML and LZX) and C# for functional coding and business logic (compared to Actionscript). This is a very important step in the right direction I think, as it’s much easier to follow proper MVC development. And you have a runtime environment that needs to be installed, and managed for versions (as with Java and Apollo). However, I don’t see anything with XAML and C# that sets Silverlight apart from Flex/Apollo.

So as far as I can see, this is Microsoft’s copy of Adobe Flex/Apollo, with a few additional splashy features thrown in for good measure. (3D interfaces, anyone?) They even originally named this project “Sparkle”, and now “Silverlight” - think they’re comparing it to Flash???

Since we’re on the topic, have any of you seen, or can recommend, any XML-based display language (UI) frameworks for Java development? I’ve heard there are a couple, but can’t recall the names.

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