A-list bloggers are so confused about Rich Internet Application technologies
Mary Jo Foley, who blogs about Microsoft on her very popular ZDnet blog has an article titled “Microsoft Live Mesh to get more competition from Sun” where she says …
Robert Brewin, Sun Chief Technology Officer and Distinguished Engineer, described Hydrazine to me as a combination of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud, Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Google Analytics all rolled into one. It’s a platform that Sun is building on top of JavaFX ….
Wo !! something seems wrong already … Hydrazine seems like a server side solution and JavaFX is all about the client side, how can Hydrazine be built “on top” of JavaFX .. anyway I continue reading and she completes the above sentence as follows ..
.. JavaFX, which is Sun’s rough equivalent to Adobe AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight.
Umm, not exactly …
- Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR are in no way equivalent
- Microsoft Silverlight is equivalent to Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Flex framework taken together
- Sun’s JavaFX is equivalent to Adobe Flash Player + Adobe Flex Framework + Adobe AIR + some more yet to be done stuff in the mobile space
Then she goes on to say ..
Sun also is working on JavaFX Script, a new scripting language that will do for Java developers what FlexBuilder and Expression Blend are for Adobe and Microsoft developers, respectively.
Oh K .. this statement is all kinds of wrong …
- JavaFX Script is a programming language like Adobe’s ActionScript+MXML … or Microsoft’s XAML+any CLR language
- Adobe’s FlexBuilder is an Integrated Development Environment like Microsoft’s Visual Studio or Sun’s NetBeans
- Microsoft’s Expression Blend is an RIA design tool which has no equivalent yet .. Adobe is building Thermo which will fill this gap on their RIA stack .. and apparently Sun is doing something in this space too.
Mary is not the only one among the A-listers who is confused about all these technologies, not too long ago I remember seeing an article on TechCrunch which was equally confused … I have come across several such confused articles in the past few months.
Its hard to blame these guys either because there are so many companies getting involved in the RIA space today (Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Mozilla among others ) and there are several new technologies and platforms in development that people are bound to get confused .. but I get concerned because both the above articles were on Techmeme so they were obviously read by thousands of people.
I love reading these blogs and I hope that the writers would do some more research before talking about such new and upcoming technologies otherwise they only add to the already existing confusion.
UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb just posted an article that shows similar confusion, read more here
May 9th, 2008
thanks Mrinal
May 9th, 2008
True ways Mrinal
Nice post.
Its not only about this confusion. The most funniest part you will find when these A-Listers start giving you GYAN on something which is totally on wrong assumptions. Silverlight has yet too many limitations and has a long way to go to compete with Adobe Flex. While on the other hand JavaFX, everyone knows what happend to Java Applet or any other UI initiatives which Sun took to compete with Adobe initiatives. I can only say they are just trying hard to swim in the high tide to compete in a battle which is always on Adobe’s side. As you mentioned they are coming up with some ideas equivalent to Thermo, but do you think they can really blend Adobe propriatory technologies like pdf,swf,png and all as nicely as Adobe can. No ways, at least I don’t see any such thing coming in next 5 years and who knows where Adobe will be in coming days….
May 9th, 2008
Mrinal,
I like the post and your interpretation of the post.
Anand,
I appreciate your thoughts, but why do I feel that you do not give credit to other organizations of what good they have been doing. My two cents:
1. If there were no other players then why would someone strive for growth – Adobe is trying because they have competition
2. A while back people had written off MS when compared to Java – look today they have .Net which is way more productive that Java
Lets try not to underestimate anyone, this is just about making lives better for people like us
P.S: This comment comes up here as I have been having feeling reading your blog a lot – It is good to love something, but why hate the other?
Regards
~Kapil
May 9th, 2008
internet sites/blogs/email subscriptions are actually main source of information about any kind of developments going around in the tech space and imagine one confused blog post can actually impact the mindset of so many people in one go..n as you said it adds to the confusion..popular bloggers around should be very careful about this…coz when you go around telling people about anything, they would rather go by what they have read somewhere on some blog!!..and then would listen to you..written content carries a great deal!!..of value..so dear bloggers watch out!!!
May 10th, 2008
@kapil
I totally agree that we should not underestimate any of these companies although making an educated analysis is not wrong.
I’m not sure if you are referring to Anand’s or my blog in your comment but if you are referring to mine then could you please point to the post that you feel is underestimating or expressing hatred for any of the RIA technologies .. i dont think I have written anything like that.
May 10th, 2008
[...] Yesterday I wrote about how several A-list bloggers are confused about various Rich Internet Application technologies and don’t exactly know what each one is. I also shared an example of how Mary Jo Foley’s recent post was wrong in so many ways and how I had noticed a similarly confused post on TechCrunch a while back. [...]
May 10th, 2008
[...] all make mistakes”. However, Mrinal’s second tweet (Mrinal’s articles are here and here) got me thinking and wanted to bring forth some clarifications for the Rich Internet [...]
May 10th, 2008
Hi Mrinal, this was a nice post. I was always under impression that all I read in ZDnet blogs are true…. but never knew that even they make mistakes.
It would great if you could review and differentiate between Adobe’s, Microsoft’s and Sun’s RIA solutions and make this easy and clear for your readers atleast.
May 10th, 2008
@Balaji
Thanks
I was thinking about that too, although that would be a long descriptive post and I would have to spend some time writing it so we’ll see.
May 12th, 2008
I have to say that the thing which concerns me most is when I hear respected tech bloggers saying that Photoshop express (built in Flex) is built in Adobe AIR.
That’s when I shake my head and think, “you guys have missed it…”
I have also thought that if I had the time, I would like to write a blog post which people could be referred to. It would take time though
May 12th, 2008
Tony,
“you guys have missed it…”
Exactly !! Adobe did an excellent job of marketing AIR but that somehow that led to people thinking AIR is Adobe’s RIA platform
May 12th, 2008
What has been bugging me a little is that Mary has not cared to reply to this issue either on the comment I left on her blog or directly on this post.
In contrast, Marshall from ReadWriteWeb replied on my post about their mistake and Bernard replied on the comment I had left on his post.
I might just stop reading Mary’s blog because of this.
May 12th, 2008
[...] all make mistakes”. However, Mrinal’s second tweet (Mrinal’s articles are here and here) got me thinking and wanted to bring forth some clarifications for the Rich Internet [...]
May 26th, 2008
Incredible…!!
Comparing an IDE with a Language …
Sound like they’re playing dice rolling sometimes
I had a journalist ones saying that the greatest feature of a release of our product was “Refactoring”. What I TOLD him was that we had refactored the core and was very proud of the new version of it
I guess sometimes these people really don’t have a clue about whatever they are writing about
January 29th, 2009
Its obvious that many of these people don’t really understand these technologies and runtimes .. as its been obvious before http://is.gd/e63
January 30th, 2009
Seriously people ( and especially people who talk about technologies as if they understand them) need to be made clear of what is what. AIR != Silverlight ( no where close).
Great article, I must say.
February 8th, 2009
[...] Internet Applications have been gaining a lot of popularity lately, but I had recently written about how some of the most popular tech blogs like TechCrunch, All About Microsoft and ReadWriteWeb [...]
May 31st, 2009
@aditya yeah I know what you mean, I like the @zoho post … but then things like this happen http://tr.im/mX1f