Viktoras, I think you're mistaken, silverlight is an alternative to flash so it's main point is to allow interactive vector animation. The language used for programming silverlight is not important, the important part is the feature set that will be bundled. The strongest point about Flash is not ActionScript (or whatever they call it) but the fact that it is present everywhere and that it allows good interactive animations.
This new focus on AJAX (which is not only javascript), Flash and Silverlight is a step back in computing. We make our powerful desktops nothing but terminals, why I need a Core 2 Duo machine to browse the web? In the other hand, we need even more powerful servers and network infrastructure. If cogent and level3 disconnect you can expect a lot of web apps failing for example. All this if we're just paying attention to the "under the plate" part of this new trend, if we look into "the food being served", which is the web apps, may they be flash, silverlight, Air or AJAX based, we have the same problem. Browsers can't do user interface controls right, they were not meant for that. Of course you can spend a lot of time and tweek your flash interface to be right, but this ignores that behind the flash and the browser there's a whole operating system with UI Libraries and services that could just be used. People are putting all their strengh behind web applications. It is a new bubble, it will explode sooner or later. Lot's been said about language X or Y and how easy is to deliver quality web apps with them but if you look further you'll see that the language is not providing anything, the cool factor is provided by bundled libraries. So in the end, you conclude that the language is not important, if the language features were important nobody would be coding in ASP. What wins situations like that is the features and integrations with web technology. People often overlooks this. This is the reason WebObjects was popular and why java applictions servers are popular too. To be succesful in the web, in my humbe opinion, you need: - Scalable technology - making it work for 10 connected users is easy, making it work for thousands is harder. An engine that allows easy load balancing and makes easier to distribute resources and instances among different servers is a must (this is needed for enterprise customers). - Split between Data and Presentations - programmers can't design, designers can't code. Only Scott Rossi, Chipp and Tereza can do both. Splitting data from presentation is very easy, you just yell: "you, presentation, go to your corner! You, data, go to the other corner! now both of you think what you've done.". The hard part is making it easy to share stuff between presentation layer and data layer. You need to provide minimal conditionals for the presentation layer so that it can inspect the data and decide what is the best presentation for it. You need to allow push requests from both ends so that presentation is able to request updated data and that if data changes without presentation noticing it, this data can be pushed. In web apps this means AJAX with lots of javascripts. - The Web is your Friend - Don't keep reinventing the wheel every time. The HTTP protocol is very flexible and allows to easily transfer pieces of data and metadata with ease. Even Second Life uses HTTP to transfer objects around. Use and embrace web standards as integral parts of your engine. Make it dumb easy to work with ftp, email, http, nntp, soap and whatever. The keystone of this task is to provide native syntax. For example in REBOL to send an email is as easy as: send "this is a test" to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" Native Syntax makes it appear as if your language was made to work with those objects from the start, like you had a plan. In the case of Runtime Revolution this is a must, we need to keep fliping our minds around stuff like "this is a built-in rev stuff, native syntax, now this is Ken libraries was it a function or a handler?" After making native syntax work, you need some kind of serialization or representation of your engine data as the web stuff we're talking about, so that you can pack stuff and send it around without creating your own code/decode method. Any language implementing the above steps is on a better position for winning this bubble race. The aim is that those features lead to elegance and allows the developer to have a clear mind when coding because it avoid hacks and contexts switches such as when you need to think in terms of functions when using a library or in terms of english-like syntax when working with transcript, or hacks to make things scale. I think that the first language to make web development a clear and elegant task instead of the mess it is right now will surely win. andre On 7/19/07, viktoras didziulis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
for me it seems more like enhancement of browser-side scripting capabilities. Formerly MS Explorer was limited with jscript and VBscript. With silverlight one can use Javascript (well, now they call it AJAX...), Python, Ruby, whatever else for client-side scripting. I remember Netscape allowed scripting in both Javascript and Perl (perlscript) already in the second half of the XXth century ;-). Viktoras Stephen Barncard wrote: > Well, they have a mac plugin...but it crashed twice. It <is> a beta. > My question is... > > WHY...yet another video 'standard'? Hasn't this all been done? > >> Micro$oft: Silverlight... pretty cool! >> >> Wish it were Revolution! >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> use-revolution mailing list >> [email protected] >> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your >> subscription preferences: >> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution > > _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
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