> I'm kinda sad to see so much cynicism on this list. These are all terrific, > creative, and exciting technologies.
Cynic?!? That's Actually, here I was trying to find the silver lining in the situation! > Is that FUD I smell? It's funny how new tech is always defended by saying people are spewing FUD. Actually, I think John has a good bead on tech and from the standpoint of longevity, you'll see that John's comments aren't FUD at all. >I'm glad that there is so much going on in this space. I find it very exciting. I find these things terribly exciting until I have to make call on a tech that my company will INVEST in for the next 5 - 10 years. Then the smile goes away a little. The smile yields to concern look when I factor in that the tech we will use needs to be cross platform capable. I mean, REALLY cross platform compatible. That's when stuff like silverlight & WPF start to fall off the map (yes, I went to the MSDN launch event, yes I heard that they are looking at cross platform compatibility with Linux, but frankly, I've heard a lot of things from Redmond.) > Large parts of Adobe's efforts are open sourced. Yeah, everything but the important stuff like Flash itself, validating what John Taber said. Using this tech is at your own risk as it is proprietary. > Large parts of Microsoft's efforts are open sourced. Arguable. So, let's get back to the meat of the conversation so I can get some recommendations. For RIA Adobe style, Apollo requires an additional install similar to Flash, where flash itself just barely hit pseudo cross platform capability here recently, though I'm told through adobe that Apollo install will work on Linux and Mac. MS Silverlight & WPF - Without WPF on Mac or Linux, I can't see anything more than an alternative to Flash with Silverlight. An alternative that requires a new install from a company that most Mac and Linux users were running from in the first place. On the ubiquity of Flash alone, I have to wonder if this is really a viable option? Firefox Cairo I just heard about recently, and haven't been able to find a lot. I was actually hoping that somebody on the email list could speak on this if they have info. So then we shift to AJAX frameworks. Wiki lists the top 19, though sourceforge lists a bunch more. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_framework). Many of these frameworks listed on wiki require a server side commitment. Either Java must be installed, or .net or Python, etc. So while I personally was leaning towards Apollo, I do like the open source nature of OpenLaszlo where everything is open sourced with the option to output to Flash or dojo. Then there is dojo which is server-side agnostic (but man does it lack documentation!) mj/v _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
