Silverlight; virtual machines in browsers
James Gosling suggested virtual machines as savior from native code back in mid 90’s. Java Applets were really cool; if someone let someone invest in optimizing the virtual machine implementation; the web today might be different…But things got screwed up. After about a decade; the web developers have realized that HTML and JavaScript is no business. Flash (and Flex) is here to rescue…and now we have a serious competitor; Silverlight
I wish that these two giants don’t screw up again and with healthy competition give us some serious platforms as HTML/JavaScript alternatives. Virtual machines within browsers (Flash or Silverlight) can solve many of client side issues in web development.
Few weeks ago; I got a chance to see some serious Flash 2 based development. The widgets and end-results are cool; but writing and maintaining enterprise scale application with Flash; yum; its not that good yet. It became wiered as soon as we started making the project externally configurable (web service paths; the web service proxy initialization; dummy wsdl and virtual urls)