Ryan Stewart, among other things, a blogger for ZDNet has posted an article called Rich Internet application predictions for 2008 which makes 10 (really 11) predictions for the upcoming year. It is an excellent post and I tend to side with the majority of his forecast.
The three points he made that stood out to me were:
- 2. AIR changes how people think of the web.
- 7. The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered.
- 9. Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs.
AIR changes how people think of the web.
I don't want to sound like I'm gushing about AIR, but I think Adobe has the pieces coming together to do something great. I am especially impressed with their dedication to the platform and the people using it. Shortly after the initial release that included SQLite there was some complaint that they only exposed asynchronous methods for working with databases. The very next release of AIR had synchronous methods. They didn't wait for 1.0 to come out or put it somewhere in the future on their roadmap, they did it immediately. Very impressive.
The days of smaller RIA technologies are numbered.
I've spent sometime, not much mind you, working with OpenLaszlo, I even created a proof of concept application that I still have sitting on my local test server. I just don't have the passion for it that I do for Flex. There just isn't much of a buzz around it in my opinion. However, one thing to watch is that they can compile the application into either Flash or DHTML. I've never yet needed to do that, but it is an interesting feature.
I can't really comment on Curl. I know what it is generally, but have never really done anything with it.
Real time data becomes an important selling point for RIAs.
This stood out to me, not because I have a strong opinion either way, but feel I need to develop an opinion. In my line of work, I've not really needed real time data. Let me rephrase that, in my line of work I've not noticed a need for real time data. I do very little "polling" from servers. I don't know if that is because my applications don't need it or I have limited vision of what they could become. Either way, I'm going to spend a bit more time checking it out.
I'm very excited about the way things are developing on the web. I think it is a great time to be involved with any of these technologies. Comparing what is available now to what we had a few short years ago is truly amazing. It gives great hope for the future.
I really look forward to seeing how the year progresses and reading Ryan's score card for his 2008 predictions.
Post a Comment