The coming RIA Wars – ZDNet explores AJAX options
Enterprise Web 2.0 is a good blog for those interested in the business2business side of Web 2.0. How will these trends in technology and processes and relationships work their way from the masses to the enterprise.
In a recent article entitled, The Coming RIA Wars the author, Dion Hinchcliffe, explores the success of AJAX and what competition seems to be brewing. The article is a good survey of backend or development platforms that engage most RIAs and make them scale, and what limitations they have.
Being the semantic freak that I am, I do take some offense to the lack of clarity portrayed by these articles. Confusing AJAX for something grander than what it really is, and further confusing backend development platforms as analagous to what AJAX or for that matter Flash is or does.
Dion speaks about Flex 2 and OpenLaszlo as if they are competitors to AJAX, which is really off, because they are as capable of serving up AJAX GUI as they are Flash GUI. Comparing Flash to AJAX makes sense, but not Flex to AJAX. Now, comparing Flex to OpenLaszlo does make sense as they are doing similar things for the backend and for developers.
Now, he does bring up XAML or more generally the Windows Presentation Foundation (Everywhere) that Microsoft is launching early next year. And he speaks about XUL. Both of these definitely compete with AJAX.
Regardless, with these clarifications the article is definitely worth a good read.
