The future of web applications lies in the hands of rich internet application developers. The two main platforms of the future will be Adobe Flash/Flex/Air and Silverlight. This should be extremely apparent to most web developers now. Web applications have been evolving more and more to act like desktop applications. In web 2.0 we saw many applications that utilize AJAX. AJAX should be required for most if not all web applications today because people have come to expect interactions AJAX enables developers to create. The problem with AJAX lies in the fact that you have to create css, javascript, and xml and then have the browser execute it. This causes problems because different browsers execute the same code with a variety of results. The end result to the developer; well I think it was covered in Dante’s Inferno somewhere around the Ninth Circle of Hell. It isn’t a pleasant place to be making things work in multiple browsers sucks it’s very difficult it is doable but ads to your production costs. In comes our savior RIA’s why because they use plugins. Now you can actually develop an application and expect it to work in a specific manner every time you use it. Who would have thought? Adobe flash is by far the most developed RIA platform to date. Adobe has also made many strides to open source its code and share with the community. Today there are numerous tools that will allow you to build swf files.
Recently Adobe announced Alchemy they have been talking about it for years but it is now out on their labs site for download. So what is Alchemy it enables the developer to utilize any c/c++ code that is open source and automagically convert it into something more useful an SWC file that can be utilized in flash! So you can now execute the code in the Flash Player and this of course rocks. You have already seen people utilizing it and creating games with it like Doom in flash. I think is well worth looking at some of those old c/c++ projects over on sourceforge and experimenting with Alchemy.
Now to be fare they are not the only company to think of a solution like this. If you look at silverlight you will find that you can utilize the Dynamic Language Runtime(DLR) and this allows developers for the most part to pick and choose their favorite programming language and work with it like ruby, java, or php you get the idea. At first I must admit I really hated the idea of Silverlight but over the years and after studying the new release I am sold. I have been working on applications for a new version of my portfolio and I will be utilizing both Silverlight and Flash. One thing I might add about the dynamic language runtime is it is different from Alchemy. Why? The dynamic language runtime allows developers to utilize multiple languages in a project when it is done it is sent to the compiler and becomes bytecode. When you use alchemy you are using LLVM it actually converts the code into AVM2 bytecode. I would suggest reading Nicolas Cannasse’s blog it will give you a clearer perspective at what Alchemy actually is and what it means. I am anxious to see what Alchemy can do and as a result I have installed in on a virtual Ubuntu machine. One thing that is nice about the DLR is you can mix different languages into the same project you can also share the same variables across multiple languages while this may not be good for large projects and could generate unmanageable code I can see it coming in handy in a pinch. One thing I might add about silverlight is I believe that Microsoft is going to port lots of .Net to run in silverlight.
So what platform do you develop for? I say both. Everyone loves flash and flash will be on ARM devices soon. It already has Android and Windows Mobile devices. Adobe engineers will make it work! For now their seems to be no sign of Apple’s iPhone or iPodTouch devices utilizing flash which really sucks for the user but is evidently good for Steve Jobs. It seems apple is destined to make the same mistakes over and over again. What developers really want is to create something once and run it anywhere and everywhere. Silverlight will soon go mobile too and I would expect them to run into the same issues on apple devices which is a shame for the consumer I guess they will be able to sell more iTunes app this way though.
Thoughts on Alchemy it took sometime to install I had to change the default config file that Alchemy came with for Ubuntu it was looking for the syslinks for LLVM in the wrong spot in short just change the location in the config file than run it also make sure you have all your paths correct in .bashrc once you have these you should be good to go some of the information on the labs website is maybe a little difficult to interpret. I also found these links (Alchemy has arrived eventually! And Solution for nothing on Linux) and they helped solve my problems. If anyone want I can post my .bashrc and config just let me know.
In other news:
Processing is now out of Beta!
You can find books on Processing here.
Links of Interest:
Alchemy on Adobe Labs
Understanding Adobe Alchemy
Nicolas Cannasse Weblogs on Adobe Alchemy
Doom – Quake – How to edit Quake Code in Visual Studio
X2O Project
Ensemble
Flash Goes Mobile
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