“As expected, Silverlight 3 was announced today at MIX09, this year’s iteration of Microsoft’s annual conference for web developers, designers, and enthusiasts. While the keynote that just finished was full of little announcements that were handed out faster than the audience could swallow them, the one that stood out the most was the third iteration of Microsoft’s Flash alternative, Silverlight. Links for the first and last beta of Silverlight 3, and the many development tools surrounding it, went live earlier today.”
I’m coming at Silverlight from the viewpoint of building (complex) Data Entry forms. I just finished watching a 25 minute video on the new Silverlight DataForm control, and it blows away everything I’ve seen in Javascript frameworks and Adobe’s Flex.
There’s nothing that compares to it, from Google’s GWT to Apple’s Sproutcore, to Dojo, or to Flex. I really think Flash/Flex is in major trouble. I’ve studied them deeply, and their data tools are extremely poor. In 2 or 3 years Silverlight will be far more used than Flash.
I used to be extremely critical of Microsoft. But what they’ve been doing lately is impressive. You can write Silverlight clients in Python, Ruby, or F#. And the Dynamic Language Runtime is huge. This is the first time I’ve been this excited about a technology since Delphi 2 – a long long time…
and it will only exist on microsoft windows PCs
I have this odd gut feeling that the biggest Silverlight announcement is still to come. What would be the killer move that would end Flash for good?
Exactly. I think Microsoft will announce sooner rather than later that Silverlight will be released as true open source.
Mark my words.
Ok Thom, I’m marking your words
. Especially since that doesn’t seem at all likely, since when does Microsoft release their technologies as open source? If they were planning to do that, why bother helping with Moonlight which, btw, isn’t up even to Silverlight 2.0 specs yet let alone 3.0?
Doesn’t add up.
Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised; they’ve already opensourced a framework under the MIT/X11 license which mono is going to use. I wouldn’t be surprised if Silverlight is opensourced given that the money is made on the servers, developer tools, consulting – all the stuff that enable companies to serve their customers better. The plugin is merely a vehicle to deliver that to customer, so there is no value as or money to be made by keeping it proprietary.
An installed based and a large amount of existing content ;-).
Oh, and Microsoft have misunderstood. Flash didn’t become popular because it caught on with traditional developers. It caught on with people who could just pick it up, run with it and create content in no time.
Edited 2009-03-22 23:42 UTC
Silverlight also runs on Mac OS X today. And Novell is building an Open Source version called Moonlight.
True, but good luck developing a Silverlight app on anything but Windows.
You can develop Silverlight using Eclipse, and one of the marketing guys said today that you can now do it on a Mac.
moonlight is the slightly retarded cousin of silverlight
Didn’t see you mention Java WebStart.
For data entry, you don’t need flashy sparckly things, but if you want them there is JavaFX as well.
The standard for data entry forms on the web is Xforms.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xforms
This has been around since 2003. Despite widespread adoption across the industry, I see no mention of any Microsoft implementation of Xforms.
Implentations are described here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xforms#Software_support
No doubt Microsoft’s implementation of forms in Silverlight is totally non-standard. If you want forms in IE, then formsPlayer looks promising.
http://www.formsplayer.com/
A new innovation with Xforms is XRX.
http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/xrx_a_simple_elegant_dis…
Edited 2009-03-23 03:57 UTC
Unfortunately there are many companies that care only about Windows as a target platform.
For example many web sites do use IE specific features or even ActiveX on this day and age.
These are exactly the type of companies that will use Silverlight with disregard for whatever else might exist out there as a desktop platform.
Even open source friendly companies like Id Software and Google release their products on Windows, and eventually on another platforms.
… an immature technology with a major release every year.
1.0 2007-09-05 (Beta 2006-12)
2.0 2008-10-14 (Beta 2008-03)
3.0 2009-10? (Beta 2009-03)
Sincerely, I would not start any project with such technology, too much uncertainty for me.
Even though Silverlight 1.0 was released 2007-09-05, it still was a technical preview, or a beta at best.
The success of technologies like this one, or before it, Flash, do not rely one bit on public acceptance, but on the relevance that 3rd party developers bring to it. Users do not install Real Player, QuickTime, WMV codecs, Flash or, for that matter, Silverlight because they like them, but because they need to in order to use something they like.
Flash succeeded because it was damn easy for non-rocket-science-engineers to get started and spit things users wanted to use. If there is no same thing for Silverlight (and Windows-only will not get too far for graphic oriented professionals), there’ll be no cookies for Microsoft, no matter how cool (or opensource) the underlying technology is.
Edited 2009-03-20 10:07 UTC