What are Rich Internet Applications? .. while there are many definitions on the web, I like to decide if something is an RIA or not based on the following criteria …

1. It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
2. Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
3. It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.

If a piece of software satisfies the above criteria, in my opinion, its an RIA. If you think about these points for a little bit, you’ll quickly realize that, even though a fairly new buzzword, is not a new concept …. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail etc are all RIAs that came out several years ago. After some more thought, you’ll realize that in today’s context majority of applications that we build have something to do with data that lives elsewhere on the network, therefore the dominant factor that defines an RIA is the richness of the experience users have while using it. So if we oversimplify, RIAs are applications built with special attention to user interface and user experience.

Many modern interface development technologies have been labeled as Rich Internet Application Technologies .. these include AJAX, various Javascript libraries and frameworks, modern browsers, Gears, Flex, Flash Player, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX etc .. while these technologies facilitate building an RIA it does not automatically imply that everything built with them is an RIA … in fact, it is very easy to build a Not So Rich Internet Application with these so called RIA technologies. At the same time, it is important to note that the use of these technologies is not a prerequisite to building an RIA either.

This is how I understand Rich Internet Applications .. what is your interpretation of the term RIA?

Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 RC0, which is a development release to help developers prepare their apps for Silverlight 2. They’ve not released an end-user runtime for this version since the release candidate is targeted at helping developers prepare their Silverlight 2 Beta 2 apps for the Silverlight 2 release. You can get the developer runtime and updates for Visual Studio Silverlight tools and Expression Blend here.

Looks like they moved around lot of stuff, so there are several breaking changes. You can download a detailed document about the changes here. Mike Snow also has a detailed post describing the changes.

Get Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0

Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance

Gears today provides some very interesting features like a WorkerPool module to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution, a LocalServer module that allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally without a network connection, a Database module that provides browser-local relational data storage, a Desktop module that allows you to create desktop shortcuts for your web applications and more.

There are some very interesting features in the works as well like Desktop Notifications from browser apps, Multiple file select, resuming uploads, geolocation support etc.

All the above features have the potential of drastically changing the experience users have when using applications in the browser and that excites me

Many of these features can be very useful for applications that run in other plugins like Flash Player or Silverlight Player as well… while ideally all these abilities should be available within these other plugins natively, but the world of web development isn’t that ideal, is it?. Both Flash and Silverlight have the ability to communicate with the wrapping html page and hence they could potentially use the abilities that Gears provides via the wrapper. The obvious argument against this approach though would be that your application will become dependent on the availability of two plugins in place of one and that’s a bad move. However, that does not mean you should not take advantage of Gears in your Flex/Silverlight applications, it only means that you should use Gears in a way that your app does not become dependent on it. One approach, for example, could be to expose Gears dependent functionality to a user only when Gears is available on his machine and if its not available quietly and gracefully degrade the functionality. You could check if gears is present using the following code ..
 

if (window.google && google.gears) { 
       //gears is installed
}else{
     //gears is not installed
}

I’m sure you could come up with other such approaches, so I’d love to know your suggestions.

Meanwhile, I cooked up this little example Flex app that checks to see if Gears is installed and then allows the user to place a shortcut to the app on his desktop.
 

 
Although the code is well commented and self explanatory here are a few things I would like to point out …

• I have used the ExternalInterface class to communicate with the html wapper, you can read more about how this is done here in the docs.
• The gears api is needed to communicate with Gears, you can read about using the gears api here
• The first thing you will need to do to start communicating with Gears is include the gears_init.js in the html wrapper. You can do this by downloading the file to your source folder and including the below line of code in the index.template.html file in your Flex project

<script type="text/javascript"  src="gears_init.js"></script>

• I have used Abdul’s very cool JavaScript MXML component to include all my JavaScript code in my mxml file itself.

• Check out the example application
• View Source

Known Bug

The flex app temporarily blanks out when the Gears conformation dialog appears on FireFox 3 on MacOS. I’m not sure why this happens but it seems like a bug with FireFox.

Finally, do let me know your views on using Gears to enhance applications already dependent on another plugin like Flash Player or Silverlight Player.

Update:

The above blanking out problem could be an issue with flash player as well so I have submitted the issue as a bug to bugs.adobe.com, please vote it up.

oh shit, Silverlight gets pushed out through Windows Update? hah, oops. hmmm

In reply to which Shannon Clark twittered ..

@marshallk To give Microsoft credit Silverlight is listed as an optional update so not just randomly installed

I don’t have Windows so cannot confirm this, but if this true I don’t like it .. even if its optional, its not fair play. This combined with the HP + Silverlight news, makes me feel a little gagged as a user.

How do you feel about this?

You can read a detailed description of the Application here on The New York Times blog, this is what they say about the technology used ..

Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.

Now this is not a new approach in the Flash world, but I think this is the first time it has been done with Silverlight.

In the process the guys at NYTimes were able to create a framework that does a lot of what AIR does .. native window, file read write, same code for web app and desktop app etc etc. This is very intriguing because if Microsoft decides to build upon this approach they could come with an equivalent of AIR that can run Silverlight based desktop applications across platforms. Of course, they do not need something like this for Windows since conceptually a Silverlight app could be compiled to run on Windows desktops, but this could be an interesting approach for them to take on other platforms. What do you think?

One of the most ludicrous results of their posts has been the several ill-informed comparisons of Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight all over the web. Even thought both AIR and Silverlight enable developers to build Rich Internet Applications, both of them are very different beings and cannot be compared…

Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin and is sort of similar to Adobe’s Flash Player and Flex Framework taken together

Adobe AIR is cross platform desktop runtime that allows developers to build desktop applications using web technologies, it has no real equivalent in the Microsoft world.

In response to my posts, Peter Elst started a badge campaign to let the world know that it is wrong to say the words AIR and Silverlight in the same breath.

So here’s my badge, feel free to use the image in whatever way you like and help spread the word.
   

Swaroop just twittered me the latest example from ReadWriteWeb … Bernard Lunn has post on ReadWriteWeb today titled MetaASO: A Bootstrapped P2P Startup From India and in the middle of the post he says and I quote:

MetaASO stumbled at the first hurdle for me, which was that you need Silverlight and that means a PC (I use a Mac). So I would be interested in any first hand experience with their product. PC is still the best shot for volume, so I don’t doubt the strategic wisdom of going that route.

But wait .. Silverlight does run on a Mac … now if you follow the link that Bernard has linked to with the phrase “you need Silverlight” it very clearly states that the software runs on Windows XP and Vista using the .Net runtime which Bernard miss-translated to “you need Silverlight”.

Microsoft Silverlight player is a cross operating system, cross browser plugin which is very similar to Adobe’s Flash Player. Its has a subset of abilities of the .NET Runtime. The term Silverlight also includes the web application library built on top of the runtime and this library is very similar to Adobe’s Flex Framework

Microsoft’s .NET runtime is a Windows only desktop runtime. Some version of it is included in most recent version of Windows. It allows you to run Windows desktop applications.

These examples bother me because some of the latest applications on the web are being built with Rich Internet technologies so why don’t these voices of the web spend some time understanding the buzzwords before using them.

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
 

This time the page told me that I do not have Silverlight 1.0 when I actually have the latest Silverlight 2.0 player installed … I clicked on the the “Get Silverlight” button and then it tells me that I already have Silverlight 2.0 (as if i didn’t know that already) .. I hit the back button to go back to the showcase page and then I get the earlier exception again.

Silverlight.net is the home of silverlight technology on the web … Microsoft, you better fix these problems other wise its hard for us Mac users to believe your cross platform commitment.

Here are screenshots of what happened (Click on any of the images to enlarge)

Here is a screen shot of the siverlight.net showcase page, it throws an exception when opened on my Mac on Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta .. but it does not throw any exception when I open the same page on my Windows XP virtual machine also running Safari 3.1, Silverlight 2.0 Beta.

I am willing to cut Microsoft some slack given that Silverlight 2 is in beta, but I hope to bring home the point that they do need to pay some more attention to cross platform compatibility, a truly cross platform plugin should behave the same everywhere.

Click here or on the image to enlarge it.

The meeting started off with Supreet, who is a very experienced designer, talking about Microsoft’s User Experience Platform and the history of how Silverlight came into being. Pandurang soon took over form Supreet as the room was full of developers and we were more interested in the geek talk.

Pandurang started off by showing some cool demos built in Silverlight followed by an explanation of the designer developer workflow while building for Silverlight or WPF. Then he showed us how to build a simple Silverlight app with Expression Blend and Visual Studio. He has a nice write up the things he showed on his blog, check it out.

I would like to extend a special thanks to Pandurang and Supreet for sharing with us and Esberi Technologies for sponsoring the excellent venue .

My main intended take-out from the session was a list of scenarios when I would want to use Silverlight to build an RIA, given that I am well versed with Flex/Flash/AS3/AIR and I am reasonably comfortable in programming in C# as well. I couldn’t come to any concrete conclusions but here are a few things I’ve been thinking about …

DeepZoom

DeepZoom is the single most important reason why I would build a Silverlight app. This kind of technology is just not available on the flash player and the kind of experiences this can offer is simply amazing. The Hard Rock Memorabilia site is awesome !!.

Performance

This was a hot topic of discussion both during and after the meeting. To me the performance of an RIA runtime has three important elements:

1. How fast can the player calculate, i.e hard core number crunching .. some argue that because of the CLR, the Silverlight player may be faster at numbers than the flash player, I will have to see some benchmark tests before I concur.

2. How fast can the player render, there is some evidence that Silverlight 1.1 was performing better than the flash player, we still have to see tests for the latest Flash and Silverlight players.

3. How well can the player render, i.e how good does the final output looks. Lets face it, one of the biggest reasons for anyone to invest in an RIA is the richness, the wow, the look and feel .. all of which adds to the overall experience of the user. In my opinion Silverlight player’s rendering quality is not up to par with Flash player’s rendering quality. This is the main reason I shelved Silverlight 1.0 when it was released and this continues to be the reason I still prefer the Flash Platform over Silverlight 2 for building RIAs. I had mentioned this point during the meeting, here is a video recording of Microsoft.com’s Silverlight page, where I’ve zoomed in a little bit to explain what I mean. Microsoft has been open about agreeing that their font rendering is not up to the mark and they are working on it, but I feel that they need to work on Silverlight’s overall visual rendering. The rendering is not crisp, edges are jagged especially when things are moved, gradients are not smooth etc. etc. I am pointing to just one example but I have noticed such inferior quality is several Silverlight apps and I plan on writing a detailed post pointing to many more examples.

The above are a few of the things I’ve been thinking about but the decision of which technology to use always depends on several factors, the above are just a few observations.

All in all it was a excellent evening I learned a lot and met some very interesting people. I tried recording the whole evening on video on my phone but this was my first time recording like this I messed up, There are two long clips, one has no audio and the other is too jerky .. sorry guys I’ll try and do a better job next time, meanwhile check out the pictures that Prakash took.

If you have any feedback for the meeting please take a minute to fill this survey.

Now its time to meet again, this time I thought it would be cool to get some insight in Flex’s competition Silverlight. Even though we are a Flex User Group, I believe it’s important for everyone working in the RIA space to understand all the technology options available and make informed decisions when selecting the RIA technology for our next project. With this in mind I managed to convince Microsoft’s Silverlight Evangelist Pandurang Nayak to come and present an Introduction to Silverlight at out our next meeting on the 28th.

It will be a very interesting discussion, so try and be there.

Click here to Register

While on the subject, I have also set up a quick survey on surveymonkey to help improve the Bangalore Flex User Group meetings, so please take a minute to provide some feedback.
 
Take the Survey

Much of the hype around Silverlight 2.0 was about the built in controls, so you can check out an explorer application with all the built in controls here. You can also check out this tutorial on creating your own custom controls.

I will spend more time with Silverlight 2.0 and post my analysis of it later .. till then have fun and do let me know what you think of silverlight 2.0 … I think these are great times for Rich Internet Applications.

If you want to know more, Sandil has a nice writeup about the event and what we did at Mutiny.in

One unexpected opportunity that the event presented was the chance of meeting many from Microsoft’s evangelism team in India, I also came to know that there is a Silverlight Evangelist in India and I plan on connecting with him over the coming days …. I wish I knew of him when I was organizing initRIA, anyway its never too late.

All in all, the evening was quite fruitful, thank you Indiblogger for organizing the meeting and thank you Microsoft for providing the venue.