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
About this entry
You’re currently reading “A-list bloggers are so confused about Rich Internet Application technologies,” an entry on Rags to Riches
- Published:
- 05.09.08 / 10am
- Category:
- AIR, Flex, JavaFX, RIA, SilverLight



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