« Microsoft's new openness | Main | Earth-sized telescope »
September 07, 2007
AIR, JavaFX, Silverlight
AIR, JavaFX, Silverlight: I know this title might make Danny sad, but the good news is that this article does distinguish the different roles of the new web technologies... even the main illustration makes a key difference clear, showing Silverlight in a browser window, JavaFX in a Java window, and AIR windowless right atop the desktop. Writer Alexey Gavrilov walks through the production workflow for each technology, from installation to development to deployment (although installation may not be as straightforward as described). I found the SVG observations to be particularly interesting. The conclusion makes sense: "As you no doubt have gathered at this point, Silverlight, AIR, and JavaFX are very different products... Adobe AIR is an attempt to democratize desktop software development by enabling web developers to build applications for the desktop. AIR allows Flex and DHTML applications to run outside of the browser -- both online and offline -- and interact directly with system hardware. Adobe also created an efficient, Flash-based deployment scheme for AIR, which makes installation transparent to the end user. Both web and desktop developers should pay attention to AIR." He then notes some similarities in the three projects: interfaces declared in XML, use of vectors and bitmaps in these interfaces, and support for more than a single brand of browser/OS. It's a good resource; thanks to DevX for hosting Alexey's article.
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 7, 2007 12:42 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/9047