July 31st, 2008

JavaFX preview SDK available

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:22 pm

Categories: JavaFX, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Ryan Stewart

Sun released a preview SDK for JavaFX which gives developers a first look at the RIA play for Sun. Coté has a couple of videos up wth Nandini Ramani, the Director of Engineering for JavaFX and we did a Podcast with Joshua Marinacci as part of RIA Weekly that should be out this week. There are a number of cool things with the tooling (and how they plug into CS3) that give the impression Sun is really focused on creating some great experiences with JavaFX.

One of the most compelling features of JavaFX is the ability to seamlessly move between the browser and the desktop. Being able to drag JavaFX content from the browser and turn it into a desktop application is pretty compelling for users who want that desktop persistence. It’s also going to be partially open-sourced under the GPL which provides the open source community with a more open RIA technology than they have today.

I really liked Tim Anderson’s analysis on the topic. The install experience worries me from a user perspective, but being able to plug into the entire Java ecosystem is a plus. I’m looking forward to kicking the tires of the preview SDK but in general the impression I get is that this is a good step for Sun. The more RIAs we have the better and getting Sun into the RIA game brings a lot more developer eyeballs.

May 27th, 2008

Mobile advertising: "The next big wave" and a golden opportunity for RIAs

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:38 pm

Categories: Adobe, Advertising, Google, JavaFX, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Mobile Internet, Advertisement, Phone, Mobile, Rich Internet Application, Mobile Device, SMS Advertising, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Ryan Stewart

Eric Schmidt has an interview that was posted today in which he declares that the next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet:

Second: The most obvious large space of advertising is the mobile internet. Every German has a mobile phone. Just take the success of the iPhone: It has the first really powerful web browser on a mobile device - and many more are still coming. Nokia has one coming, Blackberry has one and Motorola has one. They are all supposed to be released this year. By these products, the advertising gets more targeted because phones are personal. So targeted ads are possible. And that means the value of the ads will grow. The next big wave in advertising is the mobile internet.

I just got back from a trip to China where I did a bunch of customer visits for Adobe so for me, this interview hit at just the right time. Everyone knows the mobile internet is a big deal, and advertising will play a big part in that. But I think the confluence of mobile devices and advertising is a place where RIAs can really come into stride. Video, customizations, interactive games - all possible on mobile devices with RIAs. People are already spending money to customize their phones - something RIAs are a natural extension of - but they’re increasingly doing more sophisticated tasks like gaming and video consumption on their devices.

Having a rich environment on a phone allows advertisers to target not only at a very personal nature (due to the information on the phone) but to do so in a very engaging way. That’s key. SMS advertising is annoying and spammy. You have to be more sophisticated and I don’t think the search metaphor fits on devices as well as it does in the browser. So you can use video, use interactivity, use games, use the kind of higher-level display advertising that RIAs enable.

That’s why this is a big battleground. Microsoft is working with Nokia, Adobe has the open screen project, Google has Android, Sun is working on JavaFX for mobile devices; everyone wants a piece of what will be a lucrative pie. Things are going to get very interesting in the world of mobile RIAs over the next couple of years.

May 7th, 2008

JavaFX's day in the Sun

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:22 am

Categories: Adobe, Java, JavaFX, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems

Tags: Sun Microsystems Inc., Rich Internet Application, JavaFX, Dan Farber, Programming Languages, Java, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Ryan Stewart

Dan Farber has some information about JavaFX from the JavaOne keynote today. It sounds like it wasn’t a great day for demos but that we’re starting to get a better picture of JavaFX and what the plans are. Michael Coté has some additional information about Sun’s plans around Java as a whole and JavaFX. In our podcast with Joshua Marinacci before JavaOne, I was able to learn a lot about what the plans for JavaFX are and how it fits into the greater ecosystem of Java. It’s not a replacement for Swing (a UI framework for Java) and it’s also not entirely correct to say it competes with Flash, Silverlight, AIR, or any other technology.

JavaFX is just one part (albeit a very snazzy part) of many enhancements to the Java runtime which includes the Java Update 10 browser plugin that would enable JavaFX developers to target the browser with animations and vector art. But JavaFX is part of a larger Java ecosystem and is in some ways a lynchpin to allow developers and designers to create RIA experiences across a lot of devices. As Coté mentions, this is a lot like Adobe’s Open Screen Project and I think it shows an industry trend of moving towards a more cohesive multi-demensional platform.

Java has been down this road before so anyone counting them out isn’t giving them enough credit. They have a LONG way to go especially when you look at Adobe’s RIA strengths and Microsoft’s very enthusiastic entry into the space. But I think JavaFX will be a breath of fresh air for people and will help in expanding the RIA footprint further.

Update: Dion Almaer posted a video (embedded below) from the JavaFX demo:

And here’s a ZDNet video of Sun executives Rich Green and Nandini Ramani showing the JavaFX environment at the JavaOne Conference in San Francisco:

April 18th, 2008

The ever-changing definition of RIAs and how people are killing it

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:58 pm

Categories: AIR, Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Flash, Flex, JavaFX, Microsoft, Mozilla, Prism, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Desktop, Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe AIR, Rich Internet Application, Web Browser, Mozilla Prism, Ryan Stewart

There’s a long and mostly good article about various RIA technologies over at eWeek. I say mostly good because the author, Jim Rapoza, gives a pretty unbiased view of a lot of technologies. It’s a rundown that we (the entire space) needs more of and that I don’t feel qualified to give (for obvious reasons). But the problem is that Jim limits the term RIA to primarily desktop technologies with the exception of Silverlight which is included in the desktop RIA roundup and Curl, where I can’t tell if he’s using the browser plugin for Curl or the desktop version.

Defining RIA
Let’s first bite off the question of what desktop applications constitute RIAs. In general, I’m pretty broad with this definition. I think things like Mozilla Prism, Adobe AIR, Curl Nitro, and Microsoft WPF are all examples of desktop RIAs. WPF is the hardest to place because it’s the most “native” of those examples seeing as it’s the next generation of Microsoft’s .NET framework for building Windows applications. In general, I think RIAs as a whole should be:

• Cross-platform
• Using web technologies
• Have a focus on both performance/data as well as very usable, next generation user interfaces (the “Rich” part of RIA).

I also think that the best RIA platforms should have:

• A good designer/developer workflow story
• At a technical level business logic and user interface should be very cleanly separated so that the UI can easily be enhanced.

It’s the last two that I think pushes WPF over the top.

Coding for the desktop in the browser
So with that definition of RIAs, we get a bunch of technologies. Some are RIAs on the desktop, like the ones included in the eWeek article. But the longer term, older, and some would say more future-compliant are the RIAs inside the browser. That’s what Web 2.0 was built around and that’s what continues to get a lot of attention. As a result it’s VERY, VERY important to differentiate between browser RIAs and desktop RIAs and to compare apples to apples instead of apples to oranges (browser RIAs to desktop RIAs). This is where people seem to confuse Silverlight the most.

The eWeek article starts off like this with regards to Silverlight:

However, while Silverlight’s browser and operating system support is impressive, as an RIA platform, its scope is much more modest. In tests, Silverlight proved to be a fairly basic and even old-school approach to building and using RIAs. In fact, Silverlight can’t be considered a direct competitor to more advanced RIA platforms such as AIR. If anything, Silverlight is more of a direct competitor to Flash.

That’s both semi-accurate and completely misses the point. Actually, it’s kind of scary that the newest entrant into browser RIAs is being called a “basic, old-school approach to building and using RIAs”. Are browser RIAs that boring? While I’m a huge advocate of desktop RIAs, I think the browser should still be getting a bunch of the attention. And in fact, the browser is still where most of the energy is and as a result a really good RIA platform will build on what they know in the browser and leverage that in their desktop clients.

Look at Adobe. We’ve got the Flash Player in the browser and you can use ActionScript as well as the Flex Framework to build browser RIAs. Then you can take that exact same knowledge/code and start building a desktop application on AIR. Look at Microsoft. You can build a C# and XAML application in Silverlight then take that code and start building a desktop application in WPF. Look at Java. You can write Java code along (soon) with JavaFX and run it in the browser or as a regular Java app. Seeing a pattern? Same thing with Curl. You can use the Curl language to build a Curl application in the browser and now with Nitro you can take that code and build a desktop application. Mozilla Prism is the most basic example because all you’re basically doing is taking a browser application written in Ajax and turning it into a desktop application. The browser space is also where a lot of the Ajax frameworks exist and where companies like OpenLaszlo exist, so there’s room for all of those to grow.

Ajax
The way all of these technologies incorporate Ajax has also been interesting to see. Silverlight allows you to use JavaScript to program RIAs with it. AIR supports the full HTML stack so you can create desktop applications with Ajax. Prism is obviously all about Ajax. So as a core RIA technology, JavaScript and HTML are still doing very well and should continue to get attention whenever anyone mentions RIAs.

It’s a big, big world and it’s only getting bigger. And yeah, maybe it’s a pain that RIAs have started to fragment a lot. But in the end, competition is good and each of these technologies within both the browser niche and the desktop niche have their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s how those evolve that will be the most interesting and because of the close relationship between the browser RIAs and the desktop RIAs, we need to keep an eye on both.

So that’s my take on the RIA space. What did I mess up? Talkback away.

April 6th, 2008

JavaFX preview coming in May with a 1.0 release "shortly thereafter"

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 12:42 pm

Categories: Java, JavaFX, Sun Microsystems

Tags: Rich Internet Application, JavaFX, Podcasts, Programming Languages, Java, Internet, Software Development, Software/Web Development, Ryan Stewart

I’ve been really bad about keeping up with the news lately because we’re in Europe with the on AIR tour but during our RIA Weekly podcast, Coté mentioned an article by Paul Krill which indicated that JavaFX is going to be releasing a preview version at the Java One conference in May.

If we really do get to see a version of JavaFX, it could be a big deal. JavaFX has kind of been the quiet one in the big three RIA companies (Microsoft, Adobe, and Sun). There has been a lot of speculation but not a lot of hard information other than sporadic bits of JavaFX mobile talk. In the podcast, Coté mentions that a lot of Java developers just want to build a better user interface. JavaFX could be a big, big leap for them to do that. Sun sees JavaFX as a way to create interactive content with one language across devices and desktops.

I think it’s a bit difficult to place JavaFX in the general competitive space. As I understand it, JavaFX is analogous to XAML or MXML, it’s more of a language enhancement that will be built into the Java runtime than something like a browser plugin or a standalone runtime. They’re also looking to target the set-top box market which could be VERY cool to see. I think that space is ripe for RIA technology.

March 6th, 2008

RIA News Day - iPhone SDK, JavaFX on Blu-Ray

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 3:15 pm

Categories: Apple, JavaFX, iPhone

Tags: Apple iPhone, SDK, Rich Internet Application, Blu-ray, Ryan Stewart

While the RIA digerati are here at MIX there’s a lot of other stuff going on in the world of rich Internet applications. The iPhone SDK was releasedY and it looks like Apple is making one heck of a platform play. The apps that they showed off look really cool and they’ve managed to transcend the device from phone to something that’s very compelling for developers. Could this be Apple’s RIA platform? Quicktime, HTML, JavaScript and Cocoa/Cocoa Touch?

Also in the news today was some information about JavaFX and the Blu-ray specification. It turns out that the Profile 2.0 spec for Blu-ray adds a networking ability so you could start building things on the players creating an interesting living room development model. What makes it interesting for Sun is that JavaFX is part of the Blu-ray spec so if you get networking support and JavaFX support some creative Java types could go to town.

Interesting day all in all for RIAs.

February 20th, 2008

The importance of tools in rich Internet application platforms

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:01 pm

Categories: Adobe, Ajax, Curl, Eclipse, Expression Studio, JavaFX, Microsoft, OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Rich Internet Application, Microsoft Corp., Tool, Development Platform, Tooling, Productivity, Ryan Stewart

The RIA space is white hot. Microsoft, Adobe, the vast number of Ajax frameworks out there and companies like Laszlo Systems, Curl, and Appcelerator are all focused on creating great platforms and applications for rich Internet applications. We might even see JavaFX this year. Back when I did my predictions for this year I said that some of these smaller RIA players would have less than stellar years this year. I stand by that but I wanted to flesh it out a little bit because I think the main reason is tools. And all of these companies can adjust/enhance their offerings by changing the tooling strategy.

Tools are a big part of any job but they aren’t everything. A great carpenter with great tools will create a great piece of furniture. A great carpenter without great tools will probably still build something amazing. But a good carpenter with great tools can transcend his or her ability in some ways to create something very special. Development platforms are no different. The better your tools are the easier it will be for more people to create great things on top of your platform. The only problem in today’s RIA landscape is that there are really only two companies with great tooling stories. Not coincidentally, they’re also the biggest players: Adobe and Microsoft.

The tooling is also one of the big reasons that the rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft is so interesting. To paint a broad brush, Adobe has great design tools and Microsoft has great developer tools. Adobe has made a lot of inroads with Flex Builder and because we based it on a pretty good existing toolset,we got some instant credibility in the developer space. Microsoft made a big splash when they rolled out their Expression Suite as a competitor to Adobe’s design tools. One of the unique things about rich Internet application platforms is that you need both great design tools as well as great developer tools. That’s one area where smaller companies are going to struggle. Microsoft and Adobe both have the resources and the know how around tools which they can build on as they cross over into each others territory.

So what’s the solution and what’s my prediction? First, I realize I say this with a lot of bias, but that’s not the intent. If I were smaller companies I would build off of the bigger companies tools. I started thinking about this when Coté and I were on the podcast talking about JavaFx possibly hooking into Adobe’s design tools. If other RIA companies can take advantage of the Microsoft/Adobe toolchain, then they don’t have to worry about building from scratch (hard). They can simply plugin to the existing market and focus on the interoperability between those tools and their own platforms. In the Ajax world, which still hasn’t quite nailed the tooling yet, this could be a huge differentiator.

There are still risks. Microsoft and Adobe are obviously looking to make their tools play best with their platforms so being an addon is kind of a tricky situation. But I think the importance that everyone has started to place on experience means that both the design and development tools are going to be a very key part of the story. How those tools evolve, and especially in the realm between designer and developer, will be a important subplot to the adoption of RIAs.

September 17th, 2007

Rich Internet application job trends and salaries

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 2:42 pm

Categories: Ajax, Flash, Flex, JavaFX, OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

Tags: Job, AJAX, Microsoft Windows Presentation Foundation, Rich Internet Application, Salary, Indeed.com, Adobe Flex, Ryan Stewart

Indeed.com has a pretty cool job trends feature as well salary lookup which Mike Potter uses a lot to track Flex. Mike got me thinking about the trends in the overall RIA space. After throwing the various rich internet application technologies together I came up with a decent picture of the job and overall market for RIAs.

For the first exercise I trended “Adobe Flex”, Silverlight, JavaFX and OpenLaszlo:

The graph is pretty much what you’d expect. Flex has a big head start and as a result has more traction. The growth rate for Silverlight is pretty impressive and OpenLaszlo has been up and down. JavaFX (as you’d imagine for an unreleased product) doesn’t make much of a blip. After this I decided to throw in WPF:

Read the rest of this entry »

July 18th, 2007

Bubblemark RIA Benchmark Now Does JavaFX, AIR, Silverlight, and Flex

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 5:26 pm

Categories: AIR, Flex, JavaFX, Rich Internet Applications, Silverlight

Tags: Microsoft Silverlight, Ryan Stewart

I just caught that Bubblemark, which is quickly becoming the RIA benchmark source added a test for JavaFX. So now with the Bubblemark tool you have the source and the applications to compare a variety of RIA technologies. According to the post, JavaFX is really slow, but it’s still in super-alpha and he points to a link that indicates the team is working on making it faster. According to Alexey, this is how it stacks up:

JavaFX — 14 fps
Firefox + Silverlight (JavaScript) — 56 fps
Firefox + Flex — 62 fps
Adobe AIR — 62 fps
Firefox + Silverlight (CLR) — 99 fps

June 28th, 2007

Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong?

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 8:44 am

Categories: Adobe, JavaFX, Microsoft, Rich Internet Applications

Tags: Adobe Systems Inc., Marketing, Microsoft Silverlight, Internet, Internet Application, Video, Media Player, Ryan Stewart

A lot of people are talking about Rich Internet Applications. At first people weren’t really sold on creating really great experiences in the browser. Then Ajax came along and gave us a taste of how much better the web could actually be. Once people figured out that Ajax wasn’t quite the answer to all of their problems, people took a harder look at RIAs. As a result, more companies started seeing how RIAs could help them. Microsoft started talking about how great experience was and even Sun took moves to reinvigorate Java with JavaFX (though initially JavaFX is targeted at devices). But with all the buzz, people still seem to have a very difficult time getting the RIA facts straight. Most recently it’s a post on the Streaming Media blog:

It’s the same with Apollo. I keep reading news articles, like the one on Yahoo! news today, where people say things like, “Adobe’s new media player downloads video for offline viewing.” What new media player? Apollo, now named Adobe AIR, is NOT available for download, only the SDK is. Yet many in the press, investment community and the industry keep asking me or telling me that the new Apollo player is working really well or that it is changing the way content creators develop for offline viewing. Maybe it will, but considering the Adobe Media Player is not even available for at least another few months one can’t say that those things are happening today.

The main point of the post is that Adobe gets a free ride when it comes to marketing. Part of that is true. It’s been both interesting and terrifying to watch the marketing around AIR. We’ve been talking about the product so long and drummed up so much excitement that it makes it tough to remind people that this is still a beta product. Heck, we invested a ton of marketing mindshare in the codename and now have to undo some of that. But while praising our ability to get the word out, he shows that there is still a ton of confusion in the RIA world. First of all, Adobe AIR IS available, you can download the runtime right here. But AMP (Adobe Media Player), which runs on AIR, is not available yet. He seems to be interchanging AIR and AMP which isn’t accurate.

But the problem isn’t just Adobe’s. Think of how often you see Silverlight and Adobe AIR in the same sentence as competitors (that was part of the reason for this comparison post, but it should be updated now with Silverlight 1.1 in the mix). Microsoft was also able to pull off some great marketing when they unveiled Silverlight at MIX. The 1.1 alpha got a ton of hype even though it’s a ways off. Part of that was the fact that the CLR is actually running on the Mac, which is awesome, and they had some great demos. In some ways it’s very similar to AIR in that they announced early, used the buzz and are continuing to chug along. Then JavaFX was announced without any real code at all and still got a ton of marketing traction the week of JavaOne.

I think the fact that all of these technologies are getting so much attention is proof that people are really interested in Rich Internet Applications. There are a ton of new technologies coming to market and most of them are bringing about entirely new solutions. AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn’t been done before. No one knows what the CLR on the Mac is going to mean because no one thought it would actually happen. As a result the tech world is still getting a handle on what all of this means. In the short term that is going to mean a lot of mistaken reporting but in the long term the seeds that are being planted today are going to grow into a lot of attention and mindshare for RIA technologies.

John Dowdell had some thoughts on this though I’m not sure I agree with him on the video promotion though. It seems hard to believe that when video was first introduced into the player that people envisioned a world where YouTube sold for 1.6 billion dollars. But I could be wrong.