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March 24, 2008
Anti-Ajax FUD
Anti-Ajax FUD: There's a very strange article at ComputerWorld today, which describes a pay-to-read report from Forrester Research. The strangeness starts at the intro [paraphrased]: "Ajax can be slow, so Forrester recommends AIR or Silverlight". The Adobe Integrated Runtime is not an in-browser technology, and the shipping version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plugin relies on the browser's JavaScript for any interactivity... the recommendation makes zero sense. An anecdote says the initial rendering time was slower for an Ajax rewrite of a Visual Basic app, but Visual Basic lives on the local machine, while Ajax is transferred from a centralized machine... hard to compare the two. You can have both local and remote validation of user inputs... different needs. The Tamarin efficiencies in logic-processing are already available on 95% of consumer machines, within the Adobe Flash Player... works reliably the same regardless of browser brand, browser version, or common operating system details. The article makes me want to read the original Forrester report, to learn directly what the authors might have tried to say. Silverlight shouldn't be mentioned in this article at all (at least until Microsoft ships a full 1.0!), and Flex development (with SWF delivery) would be a more appropriate parallel to Ajax than AIR. The article disparages JavaScript-based apps, but for unsound reasons.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 24, 2008 01:08 PM
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err.. we shipped 1.0 [jd sez: Quote was "full 1.0".], we're about to ship Silverlight 2. I find that funny actually, here you are berating Forester folks for not getting the messaging / concept of what your technology offers and have yet to improve on understanding the basic iteration of Silverlight.
This is the 3rd time i've had to remind you that Silverlight 2 is being shipped and Silverlight 1.0 was shipped last year. [jd sez: And like I've replied each time, ever since Bill Gates first mentioned it in 2005, Microsoft has been promising a browser plugin with its own internal logic engine. Now in 2008, there's a beta browser plugin with something like that 1.0 featureset announced a few years back. Soon the company will ship an initial release! Maybe sometime after that people will be able to build atop it.]
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Scott Barnes
Microsoft.
Posted by: Scott Barnes at March 24, 2008 05:07 PM
Sounds like you've been told off ;)
I don't understand how people can sell reports of such an ill-informed nature - it scares me.
Oh and I like to try some silverlight apps - however since the 1.0 release (and the 2.0 beta) I have not been able to manage to get it to install in either IE7, IE8 (dev ed.) or Firefox 2 (under Vista) - it goes through the process of installing, but never actually loads in the browser when required - Which I mark as a HUGE failure when Flash is a breeze to install.
Posted by: Jon B at March 24, 2008 08:45 PM