Silverlight, JavaFX and Something Called SVG
May 8th, 2007Last week Microsoft announced Silverlight with cross-platform support for Windows and MacOS X. This was unexpected. And somehow they shrunk the runtime down to 4MB and met a goal of getting the installer to run in under 20 seconds. It is really an amazing feat and I am anxious to see what people build with it.
Today Sun announced JavaFX, a scripting friendly version of the Java platform which may compete on the same ground as Silverlight with a emphasis on the mobile market. Given Sun's track record I seriously do not expect much. I tend to believe that you will sooner see Silverlight applications on the new iPhone than JavaFX. I heard that at a recent Microsoft conference that Macs were everywhere. I think Microsoft may be warming up to Apple for some reason. Maybe they know that Apple will soon own a large portion of the mobile and home entertainment market and want to hedge their bets by having their hands in both cookie jars.
But what about SVG?
SVG is an XML-based vector graphics format which is web friendly with support for embedding Javascript which is capable of AJAX functionality. It is really amazing what it can do. There just has not been very good support for it yet. It seems that the makers of Flash, Silverlight and JavaFX do not want SVG to succeed. I hope it beats out all of these technologies as the standard vector graphics format. Meanwhile I still think there are uses for things like Silverlight. I have seen how it can embed media very easily. And I have heard about how it has a full screen mode so that you can seamlessly go to full screen mode for a video without having to restart the video. Given the popularity of online video this is surely something that will become integral in online media over the next few years. Can Java and Flash offer the same video experience yet? They will need to offer something close to keep up. As for SVG, I think full motion video was not really a part of the plan.
May 9th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Last I heard, Apple wasn't going to open up the iPhone to third party developers. So, I don't think we'll see any Silverlight goodness on it unless they decide to open it up a little bit.
May 9th, 2007 at 11:24 am
The Silverlight download for Mac is a 5.3 meg disk image containing a standard installer. The installer does finish pretty quickly, but it puts a 15.4 meg browser plugin on the disk. That's quite a bit different than a "4 meg runtime".
Unlike Adobe Apollo or JavaFX (what we've seen of them), the Silverlight "apps" all seem to run inside the browser itself (a single process from the OS point of view). You'd think with a 15 meg footprint they would have been able to run the Silverlight apps as proper, separate entities on the box thus allowing normal application launching, switching, termination behavior to apply.
Throw in the fact that MS is locking people into their Windows-only tool chain for development, and their track record of half-hearted support for non-MS platforms (no DRMed WMV support on Mac, for example) and Silverlight looks like a pretty lousy choice from my point of view as a developer and a user.
If you write your application for the Mac using Silverlight your users will always feel like second class citizens.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Wayne,
Good points. I expect the sites which do plan to offer video via Silverlight will work it out so that the Mac users can view the video. I am not sure if DRM is always required, but I know I have viewed WMV files on my Mac before. Yesterday I watched the Fantastic Four videos with Silverlight and moved to full screen mode. It was pretty nice with a bit of a delay occasionally. That could have just been my computer since I was running a few other things.
As far as development tools it seems that Microsoft has opened up more and more to the Mono project especially with their relationship with Novell since their big announcement this past year about working together to provide better integration between Windows and Linux. Miguel de Icaza seemed to have a good week at Mix '07 last week. He has announced work will start on a Silverlight implementation for Mono has has the specs from MS. It may be a while before it is out but MS appears to be facilitating it to a degree. And remember that Mono also runs on the Mac so you could use those tools on the Mac.