Thanks for the mention of Sidewinder, which as you say deals in exactly this space. I’m surprised to hear that you couldn’t run any demos though…that is a real pain, and we do apologise. Would you be able to take a moment to tell us what you did? I take it you installed Sidewinder first, from the project page? After that did you try to load a URL from the command-line? A simple example is Running Adobe’s Flexstore demo as a desktop application.

Sidewinder can do far more than that, but doing something simple like that would tell us whether something is wrong with the installation sequence.

Thanks again for the reference, and best regards.

Mark

A few years back (before ActionScript grew up) I did a lot of work creating RIAs (internet connected applications) using a program called iShell (now found at http://tribalmedia.com - and shamefully more DVD/CD focused currently) which allowed you to work in a scripting language called Key (Eiffel influenced - bit like SmallTalk and Ruby) with a very small runtime kernel.

I also spent some time playing around with Rebol (http://rebol.com) which is a similar concept to iShell in that it is a scripting language, with a small runtime kernel and good internet support. It’s licensing was a bit off-putting however for any real deployment.

Bill Appleton (of SuperCard) has also built a very interesting RIA platform through DreamFactory (http://dreamfactory.com/) - again a simple scripting language and a small, portable runtime kernel - that is seeing some action in the enterprise space.

The one thing that AJAX/Javascript really has going for it from an adoption point of view is ‘View Source’. I suspect a very large number of developers have learned html, css, etc through their browser’s view source ability - and the ability to experiment quickly without having to compile their code.

Personally, I don’t think the problem is with Javascript - it’s evolving slowly and it’s fairly approachable for most people. I think the problem with AJAX is the document centric view of the runtime, and the limited set of basic building blocks with which to build on (a, div, etc?). OpenLaszlo (and Flex) have a more application centric design around their XML structure (canvas, view, button, contraints, binding, etc) and API’s that allow developers to more easily create the desired behaviors (drag/drop, HTTPRequest, working with XML, etc?).

As you have mentioned Adobe has done a great job creating buzz about Flex - but keep in mind that they (Adobe as Macromedia) have been down this road before… remember ShockMachine, Central… and Flash developers have been using tools like mProjector and Screenweaver to create desktop apps for years.

Of course, we do need a new runtime/kernel (either beyond or integrated with the browser) that provides integration with the desktop, a scripting and XML language that can be used to create applications (widgets) in a manner similar to the way that XHTML allows people to create documents. Having each and every developer deploy, update and support their own runtime libraries is silly - and Microsoft and Adobe understand that.

I have to say I’m amazed that out of all of the ‘widget’ engines NODOBY has tried building their actual engine/kernel around OpenLaszlo’s LZX language (or Mozilla’s XUL for that matter). It’s free, open, documented, seeing reasonable adoption and would avoid the fragmentation that we’re seeing with all of these different runtimes again. If you’re business is building a runtime, spend resources designing, documentation and supporting yet another language?

If ‘we’ (read everyone but Adobe and Microsoft) don’t start working together we are all going to be stuck building apps in Flex/Apollo, XAML/WPF/E or (grudgingly) AJAX for the years to come.

Oh, and lastly - please don’t forget the importance of media and design. Chris Adamson has an interesting article about Java and it’s utter lack of decent media support. Images, animation, audio and video are just as important as generics, closures and IDE wars.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2006/12/rebooting_java_media_act_i_set.html