Category Archives: software development

.net, microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring, windows

The top Silverlight feature request: implement on more platforms

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One of the things mentioned by Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie in his Firestarter keynote yesterday was that Silverlight 5, the new version set for release in 2011, implements some 70% of what users have voted for. I presume he means the feedback forum here. But look what the top request is – as noted by a comment to yesterday’s post:

image

Looking at the comments, Android is a common request, and relatively easy for Microsoft to achieve given the open nature of that platform.

This was apparently not part of the 70% though. Instead, Guthrie introduced more Windows-only features – showing that concerns about divergence between Windows and Mac implementations when Microsoft announced COM support at the 2009 PDC were justified.

What if Microsoft had purchased Novell, or purchased Mono from Novell, instead of letting it go to Attachmate? It would have enabled Microsoft to unify the Windows and Linux implementations as well as building on the work the Mono team has done on compilation for iOS.

That dream is over though; the Silverlight application strategy seems focused on making it better for Windows-platform corporations.

.net, development, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software development, visual studio, Web, web authoring

Silverlight 5 unveiled: more power, more Windows

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Microsoft has announced details of Silverlight 5, a major new release of its browser plug-in and desktop runtime for Windows and Mac. Silverlight is also the primary application runtime for Windows Phone 7, though this update does not apply to the phone yet. Silverlight 5 will go into beta in the first half of 2011, and release is planned for the second half of 2011 – no more than a year or so away.

So what’s in Silverlight 5?

On the media side, there is hardware decoding of H.264 video (an overdue feature) plus enhancements including TrickPlay which enables fast-forward and rewind. There is also remote control support of some kind. According to VP Scott Guthrie, you will be able to stream HD video to a netbook.

The bigger area of change is in Silverlight as an application runtime. Here are the highlights:

  • Text rendering is much improved, with multi-columns, OpenType support, and control of tracking and leading.
  • Postscript vector printing greatly improves printing support, and you can now create a dedicated print view different from what is on screen.
  • A new hardware-accelerated 3D graphics API, as well as immediate mode graphics which lets you render directly to the GPU.
  • There is a 64-bit version of Silverlight 5.
  • WS-Trust support for secure messaging in tandem with Windows Communication Foundation.
  • Databinding enhancements, and support for debugging a binding by setting a breakpoint on it.

Alongside these, trusted Silverlight applications have new capabilities. But what is a trusted application? In the past, Silverlight applications become trusted if they run out of the browser and the user gives permission via a dialog. In Silverlight 5 this changes. A Silverlight application can be trusted within the browser as well, though Microsoft says this only works “when enabled via a group policy registry key and an application certificate”. This implies that the feature is aimed at corporate environments rather than for applets with a broad reach.

Once trusted, an in-browser Silverlight applet has the following additional features:

  • A new web browser control lets you host HTML content within a Silverlight application.
  • Read and write access to My Documents
  • Ability to launch Microsoft Office applications – examples include creating an email message or opening a report in Word
  • Access to COM components – Microsoft gives the example of accessing a USB security key or a bar-code scanner
  • Ability to call native code vith PInvoke (Platform Invoke)

In addition, out of browser applications support multiple windows including child windows, so they can be made to behave even more like normal desktop Windows applications.

You can see the theme here: making trusted Silverlight applications more powerful so that a larger proportion of custom business applications can be implemented in the browser or as Silverlight out-of-browser applications, rather than as traditional Windows applications that require desktop deployment. Put this together with Office 365 and Windows Azure, and you can see how well Silverlight works as a component in Microsoft’s cloud stack – provided users do not have anything inconvenient like an Apple iPad.

But what about the Mac? All these “trusted” features appear to be Windows-only. I asked about Mac support and was told:

We’re evaluating mechanisms for enabling similar trusted applications on the mac.

Fair enough; but the way this is put does suggest that having retreated from any ambitions for broad device reach in statements at the recent PDC conference, it now seems that Microsoft is further retreating from Mac and Windows parity, and moving Silverlight more towards being an application runtime for Windows – though note that there will still be a Silverlight 5 for the Mac and which will have the features that do not require COM or PInvoke.

It is disappointing that there is still no built-in local database support, though there are third-party offerings.

There are a couple of ways to look at Silverlight. Microsoft’s lack of commitment to cross-platform parity and its unwillingness to address broad device support means it does not look good as a broad-reach browser plugin, despite its great features on systems that do support it.

On the other hand, as an alternative to desktop Windows applications Silverlight looks increasingly attractive as its capabilities increase.

More information on the new features here – though note it neglects to mention what will and will not work on a Mac.

adobe, internet, professional, software development, Web, web authoring

Adobe abandons Project ROME, focuses on apps rather than cloud

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Adobe is ceasing investment in Project ROME, a labs project which provides a rich design and desktop publishing application implemented as an Adobe AIR application, running either in the browser or on the desktop using the Flash player as a runtime.

image

According to the announcement:

Project ROME by Adobe was intended to explore the opportunity and usability of creative tools as software-as-a-service in the education market and beyond. We have received valuable input from the community after a public preview of the software. Following serious evaluation and consideration of customer input and in weighing this product initiative against other projects currently in development, we have made the difficult decision to stop development on Project ROME. Given our priorities, we’re focusing resources on delivering tablet applications, which we believe will have significant impact on creative workflows.

There must be some broken hearts at Adobe because ROME is a beautiful and capable application that serves, if nothing else, as a demonstration of how capable a Rich Internet Application can be. In fact, I have used it for that purpose: when asked whether a web application could ever deliver the a user interface that comes close to the best desktop applications, I showed Project Rome with great effect.

I first saw Project ROME as a “sneak peek” at the Adobe MAX conference in 2009. It had made it past those initial prototypes and was being worked up as a full release, with a free version for education and a commercial version for the rest of us. Curiously, Adobe says the commercial version will remain available as an unsupported freebie, but the educational offering is being pulled: “we do not want to see pre-release software used in the classroom “.

Why abandon it now? I think we have Apple’s Steve Jobs to thank. AIR applications do not run on the iPad; and when Adobe says it is focusing instead on tablet applications, the iPad will figure largely in those plans. Still, there are a few other factors:

  • One thing that was not convincing in the briefing I received about Project ROME was the business model. It was going to be subscription-based, but how many in this non-professional target market would subscribe to online desktop publishing, when there are well-established alternatives like Microsoft Publisher?
  • Adobe makes most of its money from selling desktop software, in the Creative Suite package. ROME was always going to be a toy relative to the desktop offerings.
  • The output from ROME is primarily PDF. If Rome had been able to build web pages rather than PDF documents, perhaps that would have made better sense for a cloud application.
  • Adobe did not market the pre-release effectively. I do not recall hearing about it at MAX in October, which surprised me – it may have been covered somewhere, but was not covered in the keynotes despite being a great example of a RIA.
  • The ROME forum shows only modest activity, suggesting that Project ROME had failed to attract the attention Adobe may have hoped for.

It is still worth taking a look at Project ROME; and I guess that some of the ideas may resurface in apps for iPad, Android and other tablets. It will be interesting to see to what extent Adobe itself uses Flash and AIR for the commercial design apps it delivers.

Final reflection: this decision is a tangible example of the ascendancy of mobile apps versus web applications – though note that Adobe still has a bunch of web applications at Acrobat.com, including the online word processor once called Buzzword and a spreadsheet application called Tables.

adobe, apple, cloud computing, development, internet, microsoft, professional, silverlight, software, software development, Uncategorized, web authoring

HTML 5 Canvas: the only plugin you need?

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The answer is no, of course. And Canvas is not a plugin. That said, here is an interesting proof of concept blog and video from Alexander Larsson: a GTK3 application running in Firefox without any plugin.

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GTK is an open source cross-platform GUI framework written in C but with bindings to other languages including Python and C#.

So how does C native code run the browser without a plugin? The answer is that the HTML 5 Canvas element, already widely implemented and coming to Internet Explorer in version 9, has a rich drawing API that goes right down to pixel manipulation if you need it. In Larsson’s example, the native code is actually running on a remote server. His code receives the latest image of the application from the server and transmits mouse and keyboard operations back, creating the illusion that the application is running in the browser. The client only needs to know what is different in the image as it changes, so although sending screen images sounds heavyweight, it is amenable to optimisation and compression.

It is the same concept as Windows remote desktop and terminal services, or remote access using vnc, but translated to a browser application that requires no additional client or setup.

There are downsides to this approach. First, it puts a heavy burden on the server, which is executing the application code as well as supplying the images, especially when there are many simultaneous users. Second, there are tricky issues when the user expects the application to interact with the local machine, such as playing sounds, copying to the clipboard or printing. Everything is an image, and not character-by-character text, for example. Third, it is not well suited to graphics that change rapidly, as in a game with fast-paced action.

On the other hand, it solves an immense problem: getting your application running on platforms which do not support the runtime you are using. Native applications, Flash and Silverlight on Apple’s iPad and iPhone, for example. I recall seeing a proof of concept for Flash at an Adobe MAX conference (not the most recent one) as part of the company’s research on how to break into Apple’s walled garden.

It is not as good as a true local application in most cases, but it is better than nothing.

Now, if Microsoft were to do something like this for Silverlight, enabling users to run Silverlight apps on their Apple and Linux devices, I suspect attitudes to the viability of Silverlight in the browser would change considerably.

azure, cloud computing, microsoft, professional, software development

The Microsoft Azure VM role and why you might not want to use it

I’ve spent the morning talking to Microsoft’s Steve Plank – whose blog you should follow if you have an interest in Azure – about Azure roles and virtual machines, among other things.

Windows Azure applications are deployed to one of three roles, where each role is in fact a Windows Server virtual machine instance. The three roles are the web role for IIS (Internet Information Server) applications, the worker role for general applications, and newly announced at the recent PDC, the VM role, which you can configure any way you like. The normal route to deploying a VM role is to build a VM on your local system and upload it, though in future you will be able to configure and deploy a VM role entirely online.

It’s obvious that the VM role is the most flexible. You will even be able to use 64-bit Windows Server 2003 if necessary. However, there is a critical distinction between the VM role and the other two. With the web and worker roles, Microsoft will patch and update the operating system for you, but with the VM role it is up to you.

That does not sound too bad, but it gets worse. To understand why, you need to think in terms of a golden image for each role, that is stored somewhere safe in Azure and gets deployed to your instance as required.

In the case of the web and worker roles, that golden image is constantly updated as the system gets patched. In addition, Microsoft takes responsibility for backing up the system state of your instance and restoring it if necessary.

In the case of the VM role, the golden image is formed by your upload and only changes if you update it.

The reason this is important is that Azure might at any time replace your running VM (whichever role it is running) with the golden image. For example, if the VM crashes, or the machine hosting it suffers a power failure, then it will be restarted from the golden image.

Now imagine that Windows server needs an emergency patch because of a newly-discovered security issue. If you use the web or worker role, Microsoft takes responsibility for applying it. If you use the VM role, you have to make sure it is applied not only to the running VM, but also to the golden image. Otherwise, you might apply the patch, and then Azure might replace the VM with the unpatched golden image.

Therefore, to maintain a VM role properly you need to keep a local copy patched and refresh the uploaded golden image with your local copy, as well as updating the running instance. Apparently there is a differential upload, to reduce the upload time.

The same logic applies to any other changes you make to the VM. It is actually more complex than managing VMs in other scenarios, such as the Linux VM on which this blog is hosted.

Another feature which all Azure developers must understand is that you cannot safely store data on your Azure instance, whichever role it is running. Microsoft does not guarantee the safety of this data, and it might get zapped if, for example, the VM crashes and gets reverted to the golden image. You must store data in Azure database or blob storage instead.

This also impacts the extent to which you can customize the web and worker VMs. Microsoft will be allowing full administrative access to the VMs if you require it, but it is no good making extensive changes to an individual instance since they could get reverted back to the golden image. The guidance is that if manual changes take more than 5 minutes to do, you are better off using the VM role.

A further implication is that you cannot realistically use an Azure VM role to run Active Directory, since Active Directory does not take kindly to be being reverted to an earlier state. Plank says that third-parties may come up with solutions that involve persisting Active Directory data to Azure storage.

Although I’ve talked about golden images above, I’m not sure exactly how Azure implements them. However, if I have understood Plank correctly, it is conceptually accurate.

The bottom line is that the best scenario is to live with a standard Azure web or worker role, as configured by you and by Azure when you created it. The VM role is a compromise that carries a significant additional administrative burden.

.net, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, software development, Sun

What you are saying about the Java crisis

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A week or so ago I posted about the Java crisis and what it means for developers. The post attracted attention both here and later on The Guardian web site where it appeared as a technology blog. It was also picked up by Reddit prompting a discussion with over 500 posts.

So what are you saying? User LepoldVonRanke takes a pragmatic view:

I’d much rather have Java given a purpose and streamlined from a central authoritative body with a vision, than a community-run egg-laying, wool-growing, milk-giving super cow pig-sheep, that runs into ten directions at the same time, and therefore does not go anywhere. The Java ship needs a captain. Sun never got a good shot at it. There was always someone trying to wrestle control over Java away. With the Oracle bully as Uberfather, maybe Java has a place to go.

which echoes my suggestion that Java might technically be better of under more dictatorial control, unpalatable though that may be. User 9ren is sceptical:

Theoretically, the article is quite right that Java could advance faster under Oracle. It would be more proprietary, and of course more focussed on the kinds of business applications that bring in revenue for Oracle. It would be in Oracle’s interest; and the profit motive might even be a better spur than Sun had.

But – in practice – can they actual execute the engineering challenges?

Although Oracle has acquired many great software engineers (eg. from Sun, BEA Systems, many others), do they retain them? Does their organizational structure support them? And is Oracle known for attracting top engineering talent in general?

In its formation, Oracle had great software engineers (theirs was the very first commercial relational database, a feat many thought impossible). But that was 40 years ago, and now it’s a (very successful) sales-driven company.

There’s an important point from djhworld:

Java is hugely popular in the enterprise world, companies have invested millions and millions of pounds in the Java ecosystem and I don’t see that changing. Many companies still run Java 1.4.2 as their platform because it’s stable enough for them and would cost too much to upgrade.

The real business world goes at its own pace, whereas tech commentators tend to focus on the latest news and try to guess the future. It is a dangerous disconnect. Take no notice of us. Carry on coding.

On Reddit, some users focused on my assertion that the C# language was more advanced than Java. Is it? jeffcox111 comments:

I write in C# and Java professionally and I have to say I prefer C# hands down. Generics are very old news now in .Net. Take a look at type inference, lambdas, anonymous types, and most of all take a look at LINQ. These are all concepts that have been around for 3 years now in .Net and I hate living without them in Java. With .Net 5 on the horizon we are looking forward to better asynchronous calling/waiting and a bunch of other coolness. Java was good, but .Net is better these days.

and I liked this remark on LINQ:

I remember my first experience with LINQ after using C# for my final-year project (a visual web search engine). I asked a C# developer for some help on building a certain data structure and the guy sent me a pseudocode-looking stuff. I thanked him for the help and said that I’d look to find a way to code it and he said "WTF, I just gave you the code".

From there on I’ve never looked back.

Another discussion point is write once – run anywhere. Has it ever been real? Does it matter?

The company I work for has a large Java "shrinkwrap" app. It runs ok on Windows. It runs like shit on Mac, and it doesn’t run at all on Linux.

write once, run anywhere has always been a utopian pipe dream. And the consequence of this is that we now have yet another layer of crap that separates applications from the hardware.

says tonymt, though annannsi counters:

I’ve worked on a bunch of Java projects running on multiple unix based systems, windows and mac. GUI issues can be a pain to get correct, but its been fine in general. Non-GUI apps are basically there (its rare but I’ve hit bugs in the JVM specific to a particular platform)

Follow the links if you fancy more – I’ll leave the last word to A_Monkey:

I have a Java crisis every time I open eclipse.

.net, internet, microsoft, professional, software, software development, Sun, visual studio, Web, web authoring

WS-I closes its doors–the end of WS-* web services?

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The Web Services Interoperability Organization has announced [pdf] the “completion” of its work:

After nearly a decade of work and industry cooperation, the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I; http://www.ws-i.org) has successfully concluded its charter to document best practices for Web services interoperability across multiple platforms, operating systems and programming languages.

In the whacky world of software though, completion is not a good thing when it means, as it seems to here, an end to active development. The WS-I is closing its doors and handing maintenance of the WS interoperability profiles to OASIS:

Stewardship over WS-I’s assets, operations and mission will transition to OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), a group of technology vendors and customers that drive development and adoption of open standards.

Simon Phipps blogs about the passing of WS-I and concludes:

Fine work, and many lessons learned, but sadly irrelevant to most of us. Goodbye, WS-I. I know and respect many of your participants, but I won’t mourn your passing.

Phipps worked for Sun when the WS-* activity was at its height and WS-I was set up, and describes its formation thus:

Formed in the name of "preventing lock-in" mainly as a competitive action by IBM and Microsoft in the midst of unseemly political knife-play with Sun, they went on to create massively complex layered specifications for conducting transactions across the Internet. Sadly, that was the last thing the Internet really needed.

However, Phipps links to this post by Mike Champion at Microsoft which represents a more nuanced view:

It might be tempting to believe that the lessons of the WS-I experience apply only to the Web Services standards stack, and not the REST and Cloud technologies that have gained so much mindshare in the last few years. Please think again: First, the WS-* standards have not in any sense gone away, they’ve been built deep into the infrastructure of many enterprise middleware products from both commercial vendors and open source projects. Likewise, the challenges of WS-I had much more to do with the intrinsic complexity of the problems it addressed than with the WS-* technologies that addressed them. William Vambenepe made this point succinctly in his blog recently.

It is also important to distinguish between the work of the WS-I, which was about creating profiles and testing tools for web service standards, and the work of other groups such as the W3C and OASIS which specify the standards themselves. While work on the WS-* specifications seems much reduced, there is still work going on. See for example the W3C’s Web Services Resource Access Working Group.

I partly disagree with Phipps about the work of the WS-I being “sadly irrelevant to most of us”. It depends who he means by “most of us”. Granted, all this stuff is meaningless to the world at large; but there are a significant number of developers who use SOAP and WS-* at least to some extent, and interoperability is key to the usefulness of those standards.

The Salesforce.com API is mainly SOAP based, for example, and although there is a REST API in preview it is not yet supported for production use. I have been told that a large proportion of the transactions on Salesforce.com are made programmatically through the API, so here is one place at least where SOAP is heavily used.

WS-* web services are also built into Microsoft’s Visual Studio and .NET Framework, and are widely used in my experience. Visual Studio does a good job of wrapping them so that developers do not have to edit WSDL or SOAP requests and responses by hand. I’d also suggest that web services in .NET are more robust than DCOM (Distributed COM) ever was, and work successfully over the internet as well as on a local network, so the technology is not a failure.

That said, I am sure it is true that only a small subset of the WS-* specifications are widely used, which implies a large amount of wasted effort.

Is SOAP and WS-* dying, and REST the future? The evidence points that way to me, but I would be interested in other opinions.

amazon, cloud computing, software, software development

Now you can rent GPU computing from Amazon

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I wrote back in September about why programming the GPU is going mainstream. That’s even more the case today, with Amazon’s announcement of a Cluster GPU instance for the Elastic Compute Cloud. It is also a vote of confidence for NVIDIA’s CUDA architecture. Each Cluster GPU instance has two NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs installed and costs $2.10 per hour. If one GPU instance is not enough, you can use up to 8 by default, with more available on request.

GPU programming in the cloud makes sense in cases where you need the performance of a super-computer, but not very often. It could also enable some powerful mobile applications, maybe in financial analysis, or image manipulation, where you use a mobile device to input data and view the results, but cloud processing to do the heavy lifting.

One of the ideas I discussed with someone from Adobe at the NVIDIA GPU conference was to integrate a cloud processing service with PhotoShop, so you could send an image to the cloud, have some transformative magic done, and receive the processed image back.

The snag with this approach is that in many cases you have to shift a lot of data back and forth, which means you need a lot of bandwidth available before it makes sense. Still, Amazon has now provided the infrastructure to make processing as a service easy to offer. It is now over to the rest of us to find interesting ways to use it.

.net, apple, development, flash, java, microsoft, mono, open source, oracle, professional, silverlight, software development, Sun

The Java crisis and what it means for developers

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What is happening with the Java language and runtime? Since Java passed into the hands of Oracle, following its acquisition of Sun, there has been a succession of bad news. To recap:

  • The JavaOne conference in September 2010 was held in the shadow of Oracle OpenWorld making it a less significant event than in previous years.
  • Oracle is suing Google, claiming that Java as used in the Android SDK breaches its copyright.
  • IBM has abandoned the Apache open source Harmony project and is committing to the Oracle-supported Open JDK. Although IBM’s Sutor claims that this move will “help unify open source Java efforts”, it seems to have been done without consultation with Apache and is as much divisive as unifying.
  • Apple is deprecating Java and ceasing to develop a Mac-specific JVM. This should be seen in context. Apple is averse to runtimes of any kind – note its war against Adobe Flash – and seems to look forward to a day when all or most applications delivered to Apple devices come via the Apple-curated and taxed app store. In mitigation, Apple is cooperating with the OpenJDK and OpenJDK for Mac OS X has been announced.
  • Apache has written a strongly-worded blog post claiming that Oracle is “violating their contractual obligation as set forth under the rules of the JCP”, where JCP is the Java Community Process, a multi-vendor group responsible for the Java specification but in which Oracle/Sun has special powers of veto. Apache’s complaint is that Oracle stymies the progress of Harmony by refusing to supply the test kit for Java (TCK) under a free software license. Without the test kit, Harmony’s Java conformance cannot be officially verified.
  • The JCP has been unhappy with Oracle’s handling of Java for some time. Many members disagree with the Google litigation and feel that Oracle has not communicated well with the JCP. JCP member Doug Lea stood down, claiming that “the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body”. Another member, Stephen Colebourne, has a series of blog posts in which he discusses the great war of Java and what he calls the “unravelling of the JCP”, and recently  expressed his view that Oracle was trying to manipulate the recent JCP elections.

To set this bad news in context, Java was not really in a good way even before the acquisition. While Sun was more friendly towards open source and collaboration, the JCP has long been perceived as too slow to evolve Java, and unrepresentative of the wider Java community. Further, Java’s pre-eminence as a pervasive cross-platform runtime has been reduced. As a browser plug-in it has fallen behind Adobe Flash, the JavaFX initiative failed to win wide developer support, and on mobile it has also lost ground. Java’s advance as a language has been too slow to keep up with Microsoft’s C#.

There are a couple of ways to look at this.

One is to argue that bad news followed by more bad news means Java will become a kind of COBOL, widely used forever but not at the cutting edge of anything.

The other is to argue that since Java was already falling behind, radical change to the way it is managed may actually improve matters.

Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Foundation takes a pragmatic view in a recent post. He concedes that Oracle has no idea how to communicate with the Java community, and that the JCP is not vendor-neutral, but says that Java can nevertheless flourish:

I believe that many people are confusing the JCP’s vendor neutrality with its effectiveness as a specifications organization. The JCP has never and will never be a vendor-neutral organization (a la Apache and Eclipse), and anyone who thought it so was fooling themselves. But it has been effective, and I believe that it will be effective again.

It seems to me Java will be managed differently after it emerges from its crisis, and that on the scale between “open” and “proprietary” it will have moved towards proprietary but not in a way that destroys the basic Java proposition of a free development kit and runtime. It is also possible, even likely, that Java language and technology will advance more rapidly than before.

For developers wondering what will happen to Java at a technical level, the best guide currently is still the JDK Roadmap, published in September. Some of its key points:

  • The open source Open JDK is the basis for the Oracle JDK.
  • The Oracle JDK and Java Runtime Environment (JRE) will continue to be available as free downloads, with no changes to the existing licensing models.
  • New features proposed for JDK 7 include better support for dynamic languages and concurrent programming. JDK 8 will get Lambda expression.

While I cannot predict the outcome of Oracle vs Google or even Apache vs Oracle, my guess is that there will be a settlement and that Android’s momentum will not be disrupted.

That said, there is little evidence that Oracle has the vision that Sun once had, to make Java truly pervasive and a defence against lock-in to proprietary operating systems. Microsoft seems to have lost that vision for .NET and Silverlight as well – though the Mono folk have it. Adobe still has it for Flash, though like Oracle it seems if anything to be retreating from open source.

There is therefore some sense in which the problems facing Java (and Silverlight) are good for .NET, for Mono and for Adobe. Nevertheless, 2010 has been a bad year for write once – run anywhere.

Update: Oracle has posted a statement saying:

The recently released statement by the ASF Board with regard to their participation in the JCP calling for EC members to vote against SE7 is a call for continued delay and stagnation of the past several years. We would encourage Apache to reconsider their position and work together with Oracle and the community at large to collectively move Java forward.  Oracle provides TCK licenses under fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms consistent with its obligations under the JSPA.   Oracle believes that with EC approval to initiate the SE7 and SE8 JSRs, the Java community can get on with the important work of driving forward Java SE and other standards in open, transparent, consensus-driven expert groups.   This is the priority.   Now is the time for positive action.  Now is the time to move Java forward.

to which Apache replies succinctly:

The ball is in your court. Honor the agreement.

apple, development, microsoft, mobile, silverlight, software, software development, web authoring, windows, windows 7

Understanding the Silverlight controversy

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There has been much discussion of the future of Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin since Server and Tools President Bob Muglia’s statement in a PDC interview that “Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted”, and spoke of HTML as the “only true cross platform solution”.

The debate was even reported on the BBC’s web site under the headline Coders decry Silverlight change.

It is unfortunate that headlines tend to think in binary; alive or dead. In other words, if Microsoft is repositioning Silverlight then it must be killing it.

That is not the case. Muglia did not say that Silverlight has no future, nor that it was unimportant. He affirmed that there will be another version of Silverlight for Windows and Mac, as well as highlighting that it is the development platform for Windows Phone.

Speaking personally for a moment, I have reviewed Silverlight favourably in the past and still regard it as a great achievement by Microsoft: the power of the .NET runtime, the elegance of C#, the flexible layout capabilities of XAML, integrated with a capable multimedia player, and wrapped in a lightweight package that in my experience installs quickly and easily.

Silverlight forms an excellent client for cloud services such as those delivered by the Azure platform which we heard about at PDC.

Perhaps it is the case that IE9 maestro Dean Hachamovitch tended towards the gleeful as he demonstrated features in HTML and JavaScript that previously would have required Silverlight or Flash. At the same time, IE9 is not yet released, and even when it is, will not match the capabilities or the tooling and libraries available for Silverlight.

The Silverlight press generated by PDC must have been disappointing and frustrating for Microsoft’s Silverlight team. I am reading reports of Developer VP Scott Guthrie’s remarks at the DevConnections conference this week.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated … I have more people working on Silverlight now than any time in Silverlight history … don’t believe everything you read on the internet.

I have great respect for Guthrie; you need only see the speed and manner with which he reacted to the recent ASP.NET security scare – not trying to diminish its importance, delivering practical advice, answering comments, and working with his team to come up with workarounds and a proper solution as quickly as possible – to appreciate his commitment and that he understands the needs of developers.

So were posts like my own Silverlight dream is over unfair and inaccurate? Well, there is always a risk of being misunderstood; but the problem, as I perceive it, is not primarily about Silverlight’s progress on Windows and Mac. The problem is that those two desktop platforms no longer have sufficient reach; or rather, even if they have sufficient reach today, they will not tomorrow. We have the rise of iOS and Android; an explosion of non-Windows tablets in the wings; we have a man like James Gardner, CTO at the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions, writing of Windows 7 that:

Personally, I think it likely this is  the last version of Windows anyone ever widely deploys

See also Cliff Saran’s comments at Computer Weekly.

In other words, Guthrie’s team can do a cracking job with Silverlight 5 for Windows and Mac – it could even merge Silverlight with WPF and make it the primary application platform for Windows – but that would still not address the concerns raised by what happened at PDC. If Silverlight remains imprisoned in Windows and Mac, it cannot deliver on its original promise.

What could Microsoft do to restore confidence in Silverlight? Something along these lines would make me change my mind:

  1. Announce Silverlight for Android.
  2. Nurture Silverlight for Symbian.
  3. Follow through on commitments for Silverlight on Moblin/MeeGo.
  4. Either implement Silverlight for Linux, or enter a deeper partnership with Novell’s Mono so that Microsoft-certified Silverlight runtimes appear on Linux in a timely manner alongside Microsoft’s releases.
  5. Come up with a solution for Silverlight on iOS. One idea is to follow Adobe with a native code compiler from Silverlight to iOS. Another would be a way of compiling XAML and C# to SVG and JavaScript. Neither would be perfect; but as it is, every company that starts deploying iPads or their successors is a customer that cannot use Silverlight.

Do I think Microsoft will implement the above? I doubt it. My interpretation of Muglia’s remarks is that Microsoft has decided not to go down that path, but to reserve Silverlight for Windows, Mac, and Windows Phone, and to invest in HTML for broad-reach applications.

That may well be the right decision; it is one that makes sense, though Microsoft was perhaps unwise to highlight it before IE9 is released. Further, cross-platform is not in Microsoft’s blood, and the path that Silverlight has taken is in line which what you would expect from a company built on Windows.

Silverlight is not dead, and for developers targeting Windows, Mac and Windows Phone it is as good as ever, and no doubt will be even better in its next version. But failing another change of heart, it will never now be WPF Everywhere; and PDC 2010 was when that truth sank home.

Update: this is pretty much what Guthrie says in his latest post:

Where our strategy has shifted since we first started working on Silverlight is that the number of Internet connected devices out there in the world has increased significantly in the last 2 years (not just with phones, but also with embedded devices like TVs), and trying to get a single implementation of a runtime across all of them is no longer really practical (many of the devices are closed platforms that do not allow extensibility).  This is true for any single runtime implementation – whether it is Silverlight, Flash, Java, Cocoa, a specific HTML5 implementation, or something else.  If people want to have maximum reach across *all* devices then HTML will provide the broadest reach (this is true with HTML4 today – and will eventually be true with HTML5 in the future).  One of the things we as a company are working hard on is making sure we have the best browser and HTML5 implementation on Windows devices through the great work we are doing with IE9.