Robert Scoble asked the developer and web design community to weigh in on an emerging platform war: WPF vs. Apollo.
If you're designing or developing for the web and these terms mean nothing to you, don't worry. It's very early on in the emergence of this new field of rich internet applications (RIA), as indicated by the cancellation of Lynda Weinman's Dx3 conference (she told me this week that there simply was not enough interest -and that "it was cheaper to cancel it than to put it on...").
The merging of the web designer and developer into one super-human employee is something that will likely happen in certain areas of web publishing, but might not occur as rapidly as companies predict.
In the meantime, I learned more about these choices from Peter Fisk's comment on Scoble's blog than I've learned about web development in a long time.
Here it is:
Robert,
I have been working with .Net since the first SDK in Nov 2000 on a project to implement Lisp and Smalltalk interpreters. Since May 2006, my focus has been on the browser environment using XBAP and WPF.
At the end of January 2007, I began a port of the entire project to Flash 9.0 not really expecting it to succeed. To my surprise, the ActionScript/Flash platform has worked out very well. Net has a few advantages like thread support and ActionScript has some advantages in dynamically loading/unloading code.
I am now working exclusively on the Flash implementation.
The reason for my switch is very simple: deployment.
I don't comprehend the MS deployment strategy. They could have included .Net runtimes with the IE7 upgrade, but didn't - or with an XP service pack.
.Net runtimes are available on maybe 2.5% (my guess) of Internet-connected machines while Flash 9.0 is 85% or more.
My view is that the next application platform will be the virtual machine - ie CLR/WPF or ActionScript/Flash (or maybe something else) and developers will write for the VM API without concern about whether it runs on Windows (any version), Macintosh, or Linux.
I assumed that the MS strategy with .Net was to own the next platform and that they would deploy the runtimes agressively.
But there have been an endless series of mixed signals, half measures and missed deadlines. And I am totally confused by this whole WPF/e aka Silverlight mess. It means three .Net API's (WinForm/WPF/Silverlight) with the last one not fully specified.
Adobe's Apollo is out and it works well - so the desktop is now covered by Flash as well.
Comparing .Net and Flash is easy. One is consistent, stable and available while the other is not.
Comment by Peter Fisk -- April 21, 2007 @ 6:41 am
