Could JavaScript be a viable alternative to flash and silverlight?

Question

Take a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/

I think JavaScript is very close to what the RIA has to offer.

What is missing or for JavaScript to make it a viable alternative to RIA development?

Answer 1

While chromeexperiments.com has a lot of neat technology demonstrations, and I especially like some of the games there, they are still very far from what is done with Adobe Flash / Air and Microsoft Silverlight.

I have been a web developer for a long time, and I experienced pain with the browser in the early days, when none of the browsers cared about the standards. Today it’s completely different. Not only do we have many more browsers, all of them have small glitches, which in some cases can be problematic. It is usually applied when you make a perfect pixel, which you should not do in any case; -)

One of the benefits of Silverlight (and WPF) is the separation of the problems associated with delegating work between developers and developers. Although the toolkit is not yet optimal, it is improved in every version of Visual Studio and Expression Blend. The ability to really see what you are doing in the designer is useful to the designer.

I am traditionally a pro-web, it is more compatible, it works everywhere, based on standards and just a decent way to do something. This is only when you have advantages over alternatives, you should choose them, but usually they should be additions to the existing implementation based on web resources, this especially applies to information systems, business areas, etc.

You don’t want to get attached to a specific version of the runtime or viewer, which will return us to the problems that we have today, with too many web systems compatible only with Internet Explorer 6.0. Today it’s a nightmare in many organizations, their IT systems do not work with anything other than IE6, so they get stuck without any modernization tools when they can afford to replace existing systems.

If you develop a solution today, will users be able to use it in 3 years? How about 5 years? 10 years? Will they require the installation of special-purpose PCs that are in the corner using the old version of the OS and RIA / Viewer? It looks like police IT systems are working around the world.

One of the projects I'm currently working on (a hobby project), I started with a desktop application using Windows Forms and SQL Server Compact Edition for local storage. Then I decided that I wanted to be more accessible to users, so I changed my plans for the ASP.NET MVC project. Later, I realized that it was time to get more experience with Silverlight, so I ended up working with Silverlight 4 and Windows Azure. I am amazed at how productive you can be with Silverlight, although there is a pretty steep learning curve for those who have traditionally developed Windows Forms and Web Forms solutions.

What is missing in HTML + JS technology? Tools and frames! One of the most important things for any developer is knowledge between projects. There should be no difference in the tools and frameworks that you use if you want to develop a 3D game, Line-Of-Business application or an interactive web banner. Reducing development time is another critical point, today the AJAX framework is much better than what we should have written when XmlHttp first appeared with IE, so we are slowly approaching the place where we can really cool RIA solutions with than web technology. I think HTML 5 is the beginning of something good, although it is still pretty far from what we have today with Flash and Silverlight.

Answer 2

At the moment, the only thing you really can't do in javascript / html is sound and video. This is being modified using HTML5 standards, which include audio and video as first class html elements.

Another thing that happens in Flash is the (slightly) more even foundation between browsers. All browsers implement things a little differently, but a flash page does almost the same thing in all.

In the end (even now, maybe) you can do everything that can be in browsers, the only question will be if and when all browsers will support what you need.

Answer 3

There is a saying that "everything that can be done in javascript will ultimately be done in javascript." Of course, the lack of a good designer for this kind of interactive application is one of the problems. It is important to note that javascript is just a scripting language, where silverlight and flash are frameworks in which everyone includes their own programming language. In fact, Silverlight 1.0 used javascript as a language. So the real question is whether HTML + javascript will go so far that Silverlight and Flash aren't needed. I could see this happening in the post-HTML-5 timeframe, but it will be a while.

Answer 4

I do not think that we are close to knowing the answer to this question.

Personally, I could argue both sides equally.

JavaScript: Pro - Almost universal. The latest phones even support it. Con - It can be difficult to manage. To some extent, it still depends on the browser and browser.

RIA: Pro - Usually richer tools / better management. Con - Not so close to the universal. The flash is very widely deployed, and Silverlight is gaining momentum. More control for developers (I think of games, etc.)

Bottom line: any approach can be made to work. Each has its own strengths. Each has its own flaws. I do not expect a clear winner for a long time, as both sides will have supporters who do not want to switch to camps.

Answer 5

Yes of course. jQuery + HTML5 makes things easier. jQ has animation, AJAX, keyboard and other things. HTML5 has canvas, audio and video. What else do you want?

Answer 6

I think that there should be a greater uniformity of performance of JS engines in browsers. Cool things in chrome experiments were made possible by the ultra-fast performance of the Chrome V8 JS engine in Chrome. These things are not so exciting in many other browsers.

The advantage of Flash / Silverlight is that they are browser extensions that make their work closer to a real computer and thus are less limited by the characteristics of the browser.

JS applications will be limited until all browsers have roughly the same performance as Chrome.

Answer 7

I am currently writing my first real application in Flash (Flex, actually), but this is only because I need to have complex images from PDF, and PDF2SWF works much better than PDF2SVG.

therefore, in this particular case, it was not about the capabilities of the platform (none of them could process PDF), but about an auxiliary tool (converting PDF to a convenient format)

Answer 8

The advantage of Silverlight is that with Silverlight 4, the same code base can be used to create a web host and a complete desktop trust application. This is of great benefit to Enterprise application developers, where the user must be limited (to a certain extent) by what they can do and how they interact with the application.

So, you can see that user websites go along the Javascript route, and Enterprise applications go along with Silverlight and Flash.

* I do not know about Flash and Adobe Air, but I suspect that Adobe is also working on this.