Re: Current thinking on Best GUI development platforms

On Dec 1, 2007 2:03 PM, Skot Nelson <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Dec-1-2007, at 09:40 , [email protected] wrote:
>
> > Silverlight is still in alpha/beta and won't be amazingly practical
> > as a solution until mid 2008.
> ...
> > Just like Adobe's Flex, it will be completely cross-platform and
> > cross-browser compliant.
>
>
> You don't actually trust that commitment do you? Unless you consider
> cross platform to mean "any version of Windows and MAYBE SUSE Linux"
> I wouldn't trust that press release at all.
> (Suse == Novell == Microsoft ergo it might factor into Redmond's list.)

I use Mono on my Mac, it's a similar level of abstraction to that you
find in Perl, Python, and Java.  It runs all of those, as well, and I
recently read a success story from a Windows developer who wrote their
application in Visual Studio .NET, and dropped it into Mono with no
problem.  I expect Silverlight and FireFox to get along very well, and
I go for the new ECMA / ISO standard over an intentionally proprietary
and anti-competetive implementation of an ECMA standard.  Yes, I'm
talking about you, ActionScript 1/2.

So, let's not write that community off just yet.  The core developer
of silverlight was actually hired by Microsoft after making the first
port of Python to their platform, and doing a lot of interesting
things that they never really thought of or felt confident doing.
Silverlight is really about new dynamic language infrastructure in
.NET which, well, you folks probably would be hard pressed to care
less about. ;)

IronPython was, however, probably the first open-source release that
microsoft ever made, and in fact they authored for it a new "shared
source" license which is OSI-approved, for whatever that's worth.

Python has been in Mozilla trunk for over a year, Adobe dropped the
ActionScript compiler in as general ECMA, and are hopefully looking to
dump Flash.

*Please* don't develop new solutions that rely on Flash when there are
perfectly awesome w3c standards that require little more XML writing
than I observed in the Flex demo.  And, if you want a framework for
server-side web apps, please choose one that is free and/or
open-source.  There are so many to choose from, don't give up the
ghost, esp for those of us who toil to create things that make Flex
look like play-doh.

Cheers CHI, and happy holidays!

J

-- 
Justin Alan Ryan
Interaction Architect, VonGogo Foundation
Volunteer, ASA SF
http://www.bitmonk.net/
* : +1-415-226-1199

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