Silverlight Slim and Fat Flex

A couple of days ago, I talked about Silverlight 2.0. One of the interesting things to me was that it was how Silverlight RIA-style apps could be a lot smaller than Flex apps. I posted a comment to Scott Guthrie and he was kind enough to post a reply to my question. His reply indicates that for Beta 1, a relatively complex application will be slightly smaller than the same thing in Flex. However, much more of the framework is going to be included with the initial Silverlight download starting in Beta 2, thus giving Siliverlight a huge advantage in terms of app size.

When Adobe announced that the Flex framework could be cached on the Flash player across domains, I wondered why the didn't just included it with the Flash player. I have even bugged Flex evangelist Ted Patrick with this question. His response to me was that they would open themselves up to "DLL hell." In other words, there could be problems with people building their app against Flex framework version X, but a user has an older version installed.

As if this doesn't already happen! Let's not forget that Adobe jumped ActionScript from version 2.0 to 3.0 and thus required Flash player 9 or higher for anything authored using 3.0. This was not just some update in framework, it was the entire programming language being overhauled. It is common to use JavaScript to detect Flash player version and require people to upgrade. It is so common and so part of Flash development, that Adobe distributes the ExpressInstall SWF for doing this as easily as possible. Heck, I usually require users to be on 9.0.28 or higher, since that is the version that fixed some bugs with ExternalInterface.

So back to the Flex framework/DLL hell issue. It would simply require people to check for a certain minimum version of the Flash player (since that would correspond to a version of the Flex framework) and prompt for an upgrade if needed. In other words, it would require something that most folks already do today.

To me the real reason is that it is more economical for Adobe to not include the Flex framework. Ted has a widget he wrote showing over 3.9 billion downloads of Flash player 9. Add an extra 200K to that and you get over 726 TB. That's a lot of bandwidth to pay for. That's a price Microsoft wants to pay, because it would indicate lots of folks with Silverlight installed. Perhaps once that happens, Adobe will reconsider.

Confused Microsoft

So which is it Microsoft? Is Popfly a download, or not?

iWork '08 Stupidity

I downloaded the trial of iWork '08 last week. I would really like to stop using MS Office on my MacBook. I had a new IBM article I needed to start working on, so I figured one good way to see if I could switch to iWork would be to use Pages to write the article. It's an easy test really, since I don't do anything too complex.

I was working on the article on the plane this morning. When we were about to land in Dallas, I saved my work and closed iWork. I'm going to be in Florida for the next week, so I decided to switch over my time to central, as Dallas is also in the central time zone. So I did that.

Now I'm sitting at my gate with a two hour layover. I decided to do so more week after I ate lunch. I put together a nice graphic in Pages, where I overlayed a screenshot and drew on it to highlight important parts of the screen. This is something I usually use a separate program for because it's awkward in Word. I was able to do it easily in Pages. The thought went through my head "Word, your days are done."

I was so happy with this accomplishment that I hit CMD-S to save my work. I got some cryptic message about not being able to save unless I either entered a serial or began a trial. I clicked trial, and it told me that my 30 day trial had ended. Thus I could not save my work.

WTF!?!?! The stupid program hasn't even been out for 30 days. I'm assuming that it did this because I had tinkered with my date (changing the time zone) earlier. This indicates several layers of stupidity. First, iWork is verifying the trial against the clock on the computer. I didn't think anybody was dumb enough to do that anymore because it's so easy to circumvent. Oh, but Apple is smart. They're also doing a check to see if you mess with the date/time. Only problem is that their cleverness isn't clever at all. Changing timezones caused a false positive.

At this point I did consider going ahead and buying iWork. I figured I'm probably going to do it anyways. I just couldn't do that though. It would be like I had been bait-n-switch'ed. Apple broke their part of the deal (letting me use their product for 30 days) and I was supposed to now pay them for this? There's no way I could do that. I might not even buy iWork at all now.

So instead I opened up Word, and copied the document over to it. Luckily I wasn't too far along, so it wasn't too hard to re-assemble or reproduce the non-text parts (like tables, code samples, and the infamous screenshot.)

XForms Article on IBM developerWorks

IBM recently published an article I wrote on XForms. There have been so many times in the last five years that I've looked at XForms on behalf of whoever I was working for. It was always such a promising technology. It just needs browser support. It's funny that Mozilla has a great plugin that they don't include by default. Of course it's really just a matter of Microsoft. If IE included XForms support, it would get rolled into Firefox the next day. But of course they don't do this and instead re-invent the wheel...

Silverlight

Microsoft's announcement of Silverlight seems to have really caught a lot of attention. I'm having a hard time understanding this. What did they really announce that we didn't already know?

• Free storage for streaming video using Silverlight: That's nice I guess. In typical Microsoft fashion, they are subsidizing the switch from an existing technology (Flash) to their own version of the same thing. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that.
• .NET CLR included with Silverlight: This is the big news, I guess. Well not really. Using the CLR as a runtime for rich content over the web is not new. It was always one of the ideas behind .NET. It's a replacement for ActiveX, which even Microsoft seems to hate now (well at least IE7 complains and warns a lot about it.) MS obviously had to include some kind of runtime with Silverlight. Adobe has its supercharged version of JavaScript, ActionScript (Microsoft has this too, it's called JScript.) The CLR that will be included will be a subset of the "full" CLR. So it just means that Silverlight devs can use a stripped down version of C# that will (just guessing here) will perform JavaScript like duties. That's nice. I guess. I'm going to conjecture that for most things you will do in Silverlight, it will be a lot easier to use a dynamic language like JScript (or Python or Ruby, as .NET versions of those were mentioned) instead of C#. Adobe experimented with making ActionScript more Java-like with ActionScript 2.0, and re-thought the decision with ActionScript 3.0.
  
• Silverlight CLR open sourced and ported to Firefox and Macs: Oh wait, this is the big news. Actually I guess it is, but not for the reasons most people think. This is Microsoft's white flag. They are admitting that a lot of people use Firefox now and there's even a reasonable number of people using Macs. So for them to compete with Flash, they need to support Firefox and Safari.
• Silverlight CLR on Windows Mobile: This is actually the most interesting thing to me, though I am somewhat skeptical. The idea of being able to write an application that works on the web, on the desktop, and on a mobile device is very appealing to me. Heck, I basically spent a year of my life writing a language to do exactly that at Ludi Labs (RIP.) I went to one of those grandiose Microsoft launch parties earlier this year just to see what progress they had made on this front with Windows Presentation Foundation err I mean .NET 3.0 err I mean Silverlight. The stuff I saw from Mix only seemed to indicate things like video streaming (more on that soon) than real application development. That's why I'm still skeptical. I've written Windows Mobile apps and it is definitely a differentiated development experience vs. writing a Windows application. Sure a lot of things are similar and you can use some of the same languages (or a subset, does this sound familiar?)

Now part of why I'm not so impressed with Silverlight is that I mostly care about application development. It seems to me that Silverlight will basically enable developers to build Flex-like applications. I see its support for CLR languages as a minor advantage. It will be interesting to see if they give away a Visual Studio Express edition for doing Silverlight development. That would be an advantage over Flex. Otherwise, I see this playing out similar to how the introductoin of C# and .NET played out. Microsoft shops may switch to it, but it's hard to imagine Flex developers switching to it.

There's big wrinkles I've left out. The biggest is streaming video. It may very well be that Silverlight provides superior streaming video capability. If that is the case, then a Silverlight based YouTube would seem to have potential. It would be a real boon to pirated video, like HD episodes of TV shows. That would be huge. If works great on phones, even better.

The last piece of the puzzle is the desktop. Is Microsoft going to push Silverlight as a desktop application development? I did not get this impression. It seems possible, but why would they do this? Adobe is certainly going this route with Apollo, but Adobe doesn't have any presence on the desktop. Microsoft already owns it. So it seems like Silverlight would only be used as a counter, if needed. I'm not really sure it will be needed though.