In the not-so-distant past our department was touting Silverlight as the de facto standard for corporate intranet applications. A robust framework that allowed us to implement SOA while leveraging our experience in the .NET framework coupled with a rich user interface, all was great, until one day...Today HTML5 and advanced JavaScript libraries dominate the conversations of web application architects and developers, largely due to the cross device solution these technologies provide in the realm of mobile application development.We're living in a unique time in history right now where the capabilities of standard web development technologies (HTML5, CSS3, SVG, etc) have virtually caught up with those of proprietary plugins such as Silverlight and Flash.However, knowing how many years it took the W3C and WHATWG to get the latest version of HTML approved, can we really expect standard web development technologies to be robust and powerful enough to support the incredibly advanced and rich applications and user experiences that tomorrow's user is going to come to expect? Moreover, as processing power continues to increase and devices become more and more capable, will HTML and JavaScript be enough to deliver the goods and fully leverage the power of the next decades super devices and technologies (think holographic projections, social-commercial-industrial ubiquity, etc).Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE HTML5 and our team is doing some truly amazing things with jquery, knockout, underscore and jasmine. I'm very excited for the recent advances in the standard web development technologies and I fully embrace them. They're very powerful, cross device compatible, and fun!Is the death of RIA plugins inevitable?
Are RIA plugins a thing of the past?
html5;silverlight;flash;plugins
Nothing truly dies. Radio was once a media powerhouse, now I only listen to it in my car. TV after that, and so on and so on. That said, we're not starting any new Silverlight (or Flash) projects right now. One recent project that we did in Silverlight was recently re-implemented in Knockout JS.In many cases (though not all) HTML5 is a great skill set to have. Whether you're building a large scale distributed communications app (GMail), or a custom mobile app (check out jQuery Mobile and PhoneGap Build), or even a Windows 8 app with Chakra, or server side with Node.JS, or data access to your JSON document NoSQL store like Mongo or Couch - you can do amazing things with HTML5 and JavaScript in more places than you'd imagine.I'm not sure the significance this can be overstated. It's been a while since you could use one language in so many places this effectively.