I have been keeping my eyes open for latest developments on Silverlight and AIR.
I just read Daniel’s post about AIR is not a competitor to Silverlight, well that’s correct. Also, Flex is not a direct competitor as well. Its just about client runtimes, Flash and Silverlight, which actually renders content in browser and provide APIs to developers to create interactive experiences.
AIR can run Flash and AJAX based applications on desktop, which is great. I think it will be awesome if AIR could also host Silverlight applications.
Silverlight v1.0, released a few days back, renders XAML for content and provides APIs for creating interactions via JavaScript. And it run in WebKit based Safari browser as well.
I have pretty bad experience getting my words to Adobe (formerly Macromedia). So I hope they will get my wish from my blog :)
// chall3ng3r //
It’s better to send feature requests directly to the desired product team, at adobe.com/go/wish. My private email became over-exposed years ago, and so isn’t as good as going direct.
For this one, it might lend weight to the case if you also described what you hoped to achieve that you could not do already. (For instance, I suspect it’s possible for the Player to retrieve, parse, and render much browser-oriented XAML today, a la Deng, but I haven’t heard of anyone with interest enough to create such an ActionScript library yet.)
jd/adobe
Hi John,
thanks for your comment. i have tried many times when Adobe first bought Macromedia, and i thought maybe this time things will be diferent. but unfortunatly, i have similar experience :|
if you look at the link http://www24.brinkster.com/chall3ng3r/flashmx/ you will notice there’re many bugs reported which are still in Flash, for example, on http 300 redirect reponse, Flash converts POST request into GET, also, server’s response header, content-type is always to request’s content-type, form-ulrencoded.
you can also notice Flash Authoring suggestions i made which have been implemented in Flex Builder, but Flash Authoring always use nonsense based _btn. code-hints. there’re many things which i suggested many years ago, and posted them time to time using wishform, but some are now implemented in v9, because they were required features. they could have implemented years ago. and there’re many more left.
and also, same is also going on with Flash Lite player. adding more resitrictions, rather allowing more control to developers to create better experiences. i’ve been screaming loud on many Flash Lite’s comunities. but still, useless :|
i sent requests to [email protected] consider me as “Adobe Community Expert – Mobile”. but i never got luck :(
i will continue to promote and develop upon Flash, Flash Lite, as i love it, and i will keep trying to convince Adobe not to impose business requirements on developers.
// chall3ng3r //
… does that mean that you, too, are not interested in trying to display XAML via SWF…?
jd/adobe
yup. Flash is not intented for rendering XAML contents, and also, it will skip any iteractivity (based on implementation) that Silverlight runtime will provide to XAML contents, as XAML is not native to Flash.
Silverlight 1.1 will add support for .Net languages, which ofcourse Flash won’t be able to handle. So, the best solution would be adding direct support for Silverlight into AIR just like Flash.
Silverlight developers will soon find themselfs locked in browser, and AIR can provide good base to extend Silverlight apps to desktop and take advantage of AIR platform APIs.
// chall3ng3r //
Vote from me as well. If we consider AIR to be a special kind of browser, we can look at Silverlight for AIR as a simple browser plug-in (more or less).
The Mono project is looking into ways for hosting silverlight applications
on the desktop but of course it would be specific to Moonlight.
There are rumours about Microsoft looking into similar features,
but I can’t verify those. For Windows clients there are other options available
which would make desktop Silverlight redundant (but of course these options
aren’t cross platform). (WPF Smart Clients for example).