RIA = Really Interesting Apps?
by Bijan Parsia
Or not so much?
JavaFX...Silverlight...the more venerable Flash (will Apollo take off?), AJAX (“soon” with HTML5?), and Java applets…
So much hype! But, in point of fact, most of the tech is pretty interesting. (See JavaFX Script and the DLR for just two examples).
Of course, if I were to go into Grumpy Old Bypassed Minority Tech person, I’d whinge on and on about how Squeak blew this space. Though, Squeak is doing ok enough, what with OLPC and Scratch. We definitely ought to have hosted a Python and a Javascript implementation, at the very least. Of course, Peter Fisk is doing some pretty damn interesting work bringing Lisp and Smalltalk and their environments. It is the environments that I miss the most. I’d take a Hypercard like system anyday of the week!
Alas, I’m a bit skeptical that all this means we’ll get radically more usable apps overall. It’s possible, I suppose. I do hope it makes effective experimentation with new presentation and interaction techniques much easier.
