I'm a month away from starting UI development on my current project. I'm curious whether this group thinks any of the RIA applications are going to be successful. Specifically, we're interested in Silverlight because of the way it extends the Dot Net environment into the browser.
Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
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Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#2I hope not. I hope there will be standardized way of doing hardware-accelerated 2D/3D graphics, H.264 video and Ogg vorbis sound on the web.
http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-flash-and-new-techn...
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#3I've done some stuff in Flex, and it's nice. I work with people who really like it. Silverlight and JavaFX sound cool in their own way. And AIR makes sense. But they seem just like a convenience to developers and an inconvenience to many users, and don't really make anything new possible. They might be dead ends.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#4I think it's a mistake to talk about Flex and Silverlight as though they're equals. Flex already has massive market penetration and Silverlight is barely off the ground yet.
Given Microsoft's position it's probably a good long-term bet, but I think it's quite early for use by young startups that need every user they can get.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#5I've done some stuff in Flex, and it's nice. I work with people who really like it. Silverlight and JavaFX sound cool in their own way. And AIR makes sense. But they seem just like a convenience to developers and an inconvenience to many users, and don't really make anything new possible. They might be dead ends.
Developer convenience/speed is our main motivation for considering Silverlight, but a close second is that we'll be able to create a desktop app with the same code.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#6Similar to Google Maps jumpstarting AJAX, I believe RIA will take off if/when a big player like Amazon or Google adopts it.
Adobe is trying to get Flash into the Fortune 500/Enterprise with Flex but I think Ruby on Rails has a better chance (and they are different types of technologies)
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#7A few of us here have a vested interest in RIA's being successful, but I think that success is measured more by user adoption of our work on the platforms rather than the work of Adobe and Microsoft building the platforms.
I love developing in Flex/AIR, and I'm working on a large project now where it makes perfect sense to use it. Obviously my hope is that it is very successful.
My experience with Splashup is that a lot of people think it's AJAX, or don't have any idea what it's developed in, which is perfectly fine with me.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#8I think Silverlight would have been a great idea 4 or 5 years ago. I would have been a true killer app for asp.net/c#. However, the Achilles heel of all these applications is that they are not google friendly. Meaning they can't be indexed for search. This is fine if you use Silverlight/Flash/Flex/"Acronym of choice here" for a portion of your site (calculator, graphing, media player).
However, the learning curve for these technologies is always steep. Now not only do I have to know php/asp.net/etc but I also have to know some kind of rich client application.
I see the sweet spot as media player for your site. Take http://www.pandora.com/ for example. This is a good way to use these rich client frameworks.
That being said, when I can't copy and paste text from these application, it really limits their usefulness. HTML/CSS/JavaScript is a pretty good stack. There will have to be something that really compels me to use them before I'll divert the resources of my shop to learn/adopt/deploy them.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#9No, they won't, they'll continue to fail miserably in comparison to HTML and JavaScript because they miss the single biggest thing that makes HTML and JavaScript so dominant, no view source.
HTML and JavaScript dominate because of their openness and easy of transfer of knowledge. If you see anything cool that you want to know how to do, you just check out the source, that openness is why the web works.
That openness is also why search engines can crawl in and index things, something RIA's don't allow. RIA's have their place, but they'll never succeed big on the open net precisely because they themselves aren't open.
There's only one standard open method of building RIA's, Ajax! No closed proprietary technology can compete against that. They may be technically superior, but they aren't socially superior, and that's what matters most.
Re: Ask YC: Do you think Rich Internet Applications (Adobe FLEX, MS Silverlight) are going to take off?
#10I think Silverlight would have been a great idea 4 or 5 years ago. I would have been a true killer app for asp.net/c#. However, the Achilles heel of all these applications is that they are not google friendly. Meaning they can't be indexed for search. This is fine if you use Silverlight/Flash/Flex/"Acronym of choice here" for a portion of your site (calculator, graphing, media player). However, the learning curve for…
I forget to mention I work in a .net environment and I've also built a startup (http://whatsyour20.com) using asp.net.
Unless you really need the features slow down and evaluate your need for silverlight. Do you need it or do you want to use the new shiny stuff?
I don't even use the asp.net ajax framework, instead preferring jquery for my ajaxxy stuff. Asp.net can be a great tool but I can't really comment on silverlight as I've yet to find a real need for it.