Question

I have been building enterprise software for the last 10 years. In this time we have seen enterprise applications move from client server to thin clients. We have also seen the move to hosted solutions, albeit under a few names (asp, SaaS, cloud computing). With all these changes the impetuous has been mainly from driven from the IT department not the end user. In the first rounds of these revolutions the user experience was reduced in the name of single point of management and reduced desktop footprint.

During this time there have been many attempts to give the user a rich experience while still satisfying the crotchety IT department. The first was by the industry leader Microsoft in the form of the ActiveX control. The guys from Sun then followed suit with the applet and then more recently java webstart. All of these solutions seemed to scratch the itch but never gained wide expectance by the more stringent IT departments.

Then flex came on the scene from Macromedia. What did they do differently? Is it sustainable? Does Microsoft’s emulation with Silverlight prove they have changed the rules of the game? Will Web programming be changed forever?

Answer 1

1. Adobe have succeeded because almost all users of the main browsers on the main platforms already have installed the only runtime component required for Flex; which is the Flash player. The Flash player has already demonstrated that it isn’t a vector for Bad Stuff; it runs in its own sandbox in the browser, isolated from the hardware and the OS. So no new (and potentially dangerous) software is installed.

2. There exists a substantial developer community for Flash technology, and the addition of some new controls in Flash, and maturity in ActionScript for writing software, has tipped it over the threshold for being fully useful as a RUI.

   (Activex is Windows-0nly; Anything in java is perceived as destabilizing and too heavy; and java hasn’t managed to wangle its way into ubiquity, nor will it probably ever do so. So both generally get installed by edict, rather than user choice. This in spite of the fact that Adobe is probably the most disruptive source of unrequested ‘update-checkers’ and other near-malware we deal with in our ecosystem.)

3. Microsoft started out with Silverlight pretty aggressively, requiring only the installation of the equivalent of the Flash runtime; but it’s not ubiquitous even on Windows machines yet; penetration to other platforms is quite a way in the future; and MS hasn’t proven to have the political smarts to appear harmless yet. But don’t count it out. I think they’ve moved a step back by switching to .NET languages (with a limited CLR) for development; this seems to me to be the same strategy that has deoxygenated their WinCE strategy; but again we’ll see. But at least they have made an obvious move away from language agnosticism to appearing to want to coerce developers into .NETland.

4. Web programming is changing forever one way or another; users will demand a better, more fine-grained UI; there’s no perfect answer in sight yet, but at least there is competition for hearts and minds. I think the most encouraging signs come from Microsoft’s strong move into platform-neutral stuff like MVC, Iron Stuff, and increasingly unpolluted code streams to the browser.