A battle royale for RIA market

Ladies and gentlemen! Welcome to the RIA Theatre for this evening’s heavyweight main event!
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In the red corner, hailing from the land of Macromedia, weighing in at five years on the market and packing the punch of the Flash platform: Adobe Flex!

In the silver corner, fresh off a 3.0 release in the halls of Las Vegas at MIX09, crafted by the hands of mighty Microsoft and trained in the ways of .NET: Microsoft Silverlight!

And in the yellow corner, the new kid on the block with a December 1.0 release, but no less able to deliver complex application knockouts, the Sultan of Sun: JavaFX!

The rich Internet application (RIA) market is a three-man fight, with Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight all looking to jab their way into developers’ hearts with a steady stream of new features and capabilities. According StatOwl, a provider of statistical analysis and market research on the Internet usage, the Flash platform had 96.69% of global market penetration in RIA usage in February, while the Java browser plug-in JVMs had 81.4% and Silverlight had 21.58%.

Those figures were an ever-so-slight dip for the Flash platform and a relatively big gain for Silverlight; in September 2008, Flash had 97.39%, compared to Java’s 81.31% and Silverlight’s 17.63%.

While there are many similarities between the three platforms, and experienced developers can likely churn up eye-catching, rich applications with any of them, there are also differences that can factor into which platform a developer will choose.

Many developers have stated that different skill sets and familiarity with different programming languages will aid RIA builders in mastering their respective platforms. Rockford Lhotka, principal technology evangelist for Minnesota-based IT consulting firm Magenic, said that developers with C# or Python programming expertise and experience with WPF applications, for instance, have a head start when using Silverlight. Many Flex developers, meanwhile, said that a background in Java can be helpful when learning Flex’s ActionScript language because the languages have similar object-oriented characteristics.

Dave Meeker, user experience strategy lead for RIA development company Roundarch, agreed with the notion that developers with specific programming skills will gravitate toward a certain platform. Developers knowledgeable in Java have gone the Flex route. One of the intentions behind Flex was to cater to developers that have built Web applications in Java and JavaServer Pages, Meeker said.

“You can see a line drawn through the development community,” Meeker said. “The guys that are more open source, Java, and traditional Adobe Macromedia developers are all more in the Flex camp. That’s great, but there are also [around] millions and millions of Windows developers out there who will end up in the Silverlight camp because it’s what they know.

“I always cringe when I see a company embarking on a project and saying, ‘We’re going to use a brand new technology that we’ve never used before, and we have a deadline to meet.’ ”

Differences in maturity
R.J. Owen, senior developer at Denver-based user interface designer EffectiveUI, said that Flex is a more mature platform, and that JavaFX and Silverlight have catching up to do in the coming years.

One application that Owen built using Flex was an online interactive program called Discovery Earth Live, which tracks global climate data for the Discovery Channel. The app displays a 3D view of Earth that shows video on climate trends, and Owen said that Flex is the only platform with the proper capacity to build 3D interfaces.

“Silverlight doesn’t have nearly a mature enough codebase to build something this complex,” Owen said. “They’re going to be seeing some pretty basic RIAs for probably the next year.”

Microsoft executives, however, said that Silverlight 3 brings the ability to create 3D graphics.

Because Silverlight is newer than Flex, it doesn’t have as broad a user and knowledge base as Adobe’s platform, according to Owen. Sandy Scott, principal software engineer at Marathon Technologies, echoed his sentiment on Silverlight's newness. Owen said that the community of developers for Flex helped him with Discovery Earth Live because many developers shared their previous experiences in creating 3D applications using Flex.

JavaFX, meanwhile, is integrated with the Java Runtime, and JavaFX applications will run on any browser that runs the Java Runtime Environment. But JavaFX lacks the maturity level of the other platforms, as it was made generally available in late 2008. However, developers that have used JavaFX touted its ability to call millions of Java classes with its rich client, along with its ability to improve Java deployment and make Java leaner.

Meeker, who has experience working with all three platforms, said that JavaFX wasn’t the right platform for him. “It just doesn’t give us the tools we need to build the kind of apps we can and deploy them to a large scale,” he said.

“For a corporate environment, it might be more suiting, but lined up against Flex and others, it isn’t right for our clients. Plus, we had some problems with the development environment; on the Mac, we downloaded the dev tools they had, and they didn’t install right. It just had a lot of problems.”

As Owen alluded to in his comment about Adobe’s advantage in maturity, one of the main factors currently in the competition among the three platforms is age. Adobe is the veteran within the group, as Flex was released in March 2004 and Silverlight was introduced in early 2007.

“There’s a wealth of creative knowledge and experience in the marketplace, together with five years of proven development with the Flex framework,” said Dave Gruber, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for Flex. “We’ve built up a strong community and a strong set of partners that we work closely with.”

On the other end of the age scale, Jacob Lehrbaum, a senior product line manager at Sun, noted JavaFX’s youth as a platform but said that the company has seen a big uptake in the technology. Activity in forums and mailing lists has grown in recent months, and many blogs and websites around JavaFX have spawned, he said. Additionally, the company last month launched the JavaFX Coding Challenge, which will have developers show off applications designed with JavaFX for cash prizes. The contest will run until the end of May, and more details are available at www.javafx.com/challenge.

Rising above the competition
One of the ways that Sun is trying to distinguish itself is in focusing on bringing RIA content across all devices. In February, the company released JavaFX Mobile, which offers the same features as the desktop version for development on mobile devices. Lehrbaum said that the company’s next push is to bring JavaFX to televisions. While he declined to provide details regarding how JavaFX would work on TV, he said the idea is to leverage technologies like Blu-ray for JavaFX.

Lehrbaum said that another advantage for Sun in the RIA market is the Java platform itself. “You can leverage fairly powerful libraries, and we have an advanced, multi-threaded VM that can handle pretty complex functionality under the surface,” he said.

“JavaFX is introducing a way to make the user interface and interactivity more fun and intuitive while leveraging the underlying capability they already had with Java.”

Chris Swenson, Microsoft’s senior strategy manager of the .NET platform, said that in order to continue competing with Adobe and Sun in the RIA market, Microsoft’s strategy is to innovate as fast as possible and to try to deliver features that are unique for RIA development.

“I think we do that with our platform and our tooling,” Swenson said. “Silverlight’s only been on the market for 18 months, so we’re innovating at an incredibly rapid clip and bringing all these features into Silverlight at an incredibly fast pace. I think that’s how we’re going to compete in this market, and if we make our customers happy, I think we’ll be successful.”

Adobe’s Gruber, meanwhile, said that the company’s strength lies in the overall Flash multimedia platform, which encompasses Flex, the AIR runtime, the Flash client, and various other software and services. He said that Adobe will continue to innovate and build out the platform in order to maintain competition with the other platforms.

“As we look at the competitive space and look at what Microsoft and Sun are doing, we believe we’re setting the vision for where RIAs are going in the world,” he said. “[I] believe we’re setting the bar for the others to follow.”

An interesting challenge for the three companies will be having the most success at enticing developers without related programming skills.

“I guess the challenge that these companies have now is packing enough features into their tool set to swing someone in the opposite direction,” Meeker said. “The Adobe people are die-hards and the Microsoft people are die-hards, so I don’t know if either platform has matured to the point to make people say, ‘I have to switch to that because it’s the best thing out there.’ ”

When it comes to luring developers from the other side of the playing field, Gruber admitted that there are many companies and developers deeply committed to Microsoft software that will choose Microsoft over anything else. However, there is also a large portion of the developer base that are open to using Flex in conjunction with the .NET platform, he said. Third parties have created Visual Studio plug-ins for Flex development, and Adobe will “continue to invest” in integrations between Flex and .NET.

Swenson claimed that there are many Java developers learning how to work with the .NET platform, which developers have said is comparable in usability to Silverlight. There are capabilities for developers to use JavaScript within Silverlight, and there are similarities between C# and Java. Additionally, an advantage to the .NET platform is that it involves writing less code, he said.

Lehrbaum also acknowledged that the natural inclination for developers is to use technologies that are familiar and easy. While most JavaFX adopters have been Java developers, Lehrbaum said that he’s learned from developers that they’re willing to try new things, especially if it can help them solve a problem.

“A lot of the languages and technologies that people are using today aren’t so different that they’re too challenging for developers to pick up,” Lehrbaum said. “If it can help them tackle a business problem or create content faster, using that technology will be a legitimate option.”

Going offline
The new features announced in Silverlight 3 caught the eye of Meeker, who attended Microsoft’s MIX09 Conference in mid-March. In Meeker’s opinion, improvements to Silverlight include its interoperability with the H.264 video standard, a feature that Gruber claimed Adobe already offers in Flex, and the use of a graphics processing unit for multi-threading. However, Meeker said he wasn’t convinced that any of the new features will be huge difference-makers in terms of giving Silverlight an advantage over the other platforms.

One feature in Silverlight 3 that Microsoft is excited about and developers have lauded is the ability to work offline and out-of-browser. Swenson said that this lets developers create lightweight data-stacking applications that can serve as a “Web companion.”

“The offline support is compelling because you could be in the middle of either a media experience or an application experience and lose Internet connectivity for a little bit,” Swenson said. “But because we cache data on the back end, you can still either work with that application or consume that media. And once you get Internet connectivity again, you can continue where you left off.”

Gruber said that Adobe AIR has similar capabilities, offering local access to data storage in an embedded relational database that comes with AIR. AIR lets developers drag files into and out of the application, as well as run databases offline. Additionally, Adobe’s runtime is compatible with Linux and Windows, according to Gruber.

“You’re creating applications for Adobe AIR using the Flex framework, so for that same application that you can write to run in the browser, there’s a whole new series of APIs and commands that allow you to have access to many capabilities outside the browser,” Gruber said.

Sun, meanwhile, said that such offline capabilities are also available in JavaFX. Lehrbaum said that JavaFX can launch applications from the desktop and the Web. If a developer wants to receive live information from the network or cloud that he or she is connected to, then Web connectivity is useful, but [those developers] can also develop applications without network connectivity, he said.

Though Adobe and Sun may not seem fazed, Meeker thinks that Microsoft’s offline capabilities give the company a point in the battle against its competitors.

“If Adobe’s playing chess against Microsoft, Microsoft didn’t…put them in checkmate, they just made a move where Adobe knows they’re going to either lose a bishop or a knight,” he said of the offline capabilities. “They’re really going to have to think their way out of this, because Microsoft essentially just jammed up Adobe’s strategy and Adobe will have to answer one way or the other.”

Moving forward, innovation most likely won’t stop at offline capabilities and 3D graphics. Sun’s television capabilities are expected to be unveiled in the coming months, Adobe has plans to make its Flash Catalyst codeless interface designer available in a beta, and no doubt Microsoft will soon be putting together the pieces for Silverlight 4. It will certainly continue to be a lively fight in the RIA market.

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BY Jeff Feinman
Source：SDTimes

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