There are a few players I didn’t mention in my previous post on Rich Internet Applications. Laszlo has its own framework for building Flash-based apps, and they have plans to make their framework target Ajax as well.
Which brings me to the one platform I think has the best chance of winning: the web itself. HTML and JavaScript-based applications may be a pain to write, but it’s slowly getting easier, as evidenced by the dozens of Ajax libraries that have sprung up over the past two years.
I see the rise of the web as an application platform similar to the rise of the PC. At first, the PC was absolutely pathetic compared to its more powerful cousins: RAM measured in kilobytes, cassette drives for storage, operating systems that didn’t support subdirectories. But slowly and erratically the PC improved over time, until it ate companies like Digital for lunch.
The same is going on with the web. At first, HTML was pretty impoverished compared to desktop operating systems. No persistent storage, no drag-and-drop… I remember when web pages all had gray backgrounds and when you couldn’t even fill out forms. But all of these capabilities have slowly been added, and now web applications are vastly more capable than they were five years ago.
Isn’t Ajax kinda ugly? Sure! So are the x86 architecture and the Win32 API, but those aren’t going away anytime soon. Neither is the web.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t keep evolving. There are two efforts that could greatly improve the current state of affairs: HTML 5 and JavaScript 2. HTML 5 adds features like offline data, while JavaScript 2 includes some badly needed features such as a consistent packaging mechanism and class-based OOP (which may or may not be a good idea). Whether they are successful depends largely on whether Microsoft bothers to implement them well in Internet Explorer, and Microsoft is participating in both projects, so there is some hope.
So I believe HTML and JavaScript will continue to dominate over any other RIA platform. Microsoft’s actions with Internet Explorer will help determine how smoothly we get to that future.
Dave Thomas made an interesting point during his keynote at RailsConf.
He traced some of the history of computing. First you have dumb stateless terminals (e.g. the IBM 3270) that connect to a central mainframe via half duplex connections, displaying forms but submitting them back to the server and relying on it to do all the processing. Then this evolved into terminals that are able to do full duplex real-time interaction with the mainframe, maybe a character at a time, but still relying on it to perform computations. Finally, “smart” terminals evolved that were able to store state and perform some computations on the client side.
Then, in the early 90s, the next step in the evolution of computing arrived: the browser, a dumb stateless interface connected half-duplex to a central server, capable of displaying forms but submitting the results back to the server and relying on it to do all the processing. Then you have ajax, a full-duplex communication in which the client remains dumb and stateless but at least a little more interactive. And so forth.
In his words, “There is no practical difference between the [web] browser and the [IBM] 3270, except that the browser can display better porn.”
Interesting to think that maybe all we’ve been doing so far with internet applications has been to go around in circles and reinvent the 70s.