{"id":264,"date":"2007-06-29T16:33:36","date_gmt":"2007-06-29T15:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/?p=264"},"modified":"2007-06-29T16:33:36","modified_gmt":"2007-06-29T15:33:36","slug":"common-misconceptions-about-rich-internet-applications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/264-common-misconceptions-about-rich-internet-applications.html","title":{"rendered":"Common misconceptions about Rich Internet Applications"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Stewart blogs about Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I don’t agree with everything he says, especially this one:<\/p>\n

\n

AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn\u2019t been done before.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I suppose there might be a way to define “web apps” that excludes everything prior to AIR, but it would be difficult. I’m composing this blog post in Windows Live Writer<\/a> – I consider this to be a desktop web app, especially the latest version which synchronizes the local copy of a post with what is on the web. Many of the widgets and gadgets in Vista or Yahoo! Widgets or the Mac Dashboard are web apps. Apple’s iTunes is a hybrid web\/desktop application; it includes an online store that runs outside the browser. Any Java or .NET application which retrieves data from the internet via web services is a web app. Even running HTML applications on the desktop has been done before, for example with Microsoft’s HTML Application<\/a> model. If you exclude anything that is not cross-platform then the list is shorter – but you still have Java and Mono; iTunes is cross-platform; and even AIR won’t do Linux in its first release.<\/p>\n

That said, I agree that there is a far amount of confusion out there. Half the problem is that the terms are overloaded. As I understand it, Adobe’s use of the term Rich Internet Applications includes almost any web application beyond HTML, whether or not it is running in the browser – though usually what Adobe really<\/strong> means is “any application that uses the Flash runtime”.<\/p>\n

I often see Silverlight<\/a> and AIR<\/a> treated as close competitors, yet Silverlight is for browser applications, and AIR is for desktop applications.<\/p>\n

Some assume that Silverlight is Windows-only, but it is not, it runs on Intel Mac and Mono is doing amazing work with Moonlight<\/a> – Silverlight for Linux.<\/p>\n

Another wrong assumption is that because AIR applications run on the desktop, they can do anything a native code desktop application can do. In reality they have no access to native code libraries.<\/p>\n

Adobe had us all thinking that it was somehow adopting Google’s Gears<\/a> – I was fooled by this – but it is not at all; it just happens to have the same open source database engine<\/a> in its own project.<\/p>\n

So the other reason tech journalists “get it wrong” is because the whole “beyond HTML” story is complex and hard to put across in a few words. That is what we are meant to be good at, but there is always a danger of over-simplifying to the point of inaccuracy.<\/p>\n

Technorati tags: adobe<\/a>, microsoft<\/a>, silverlight<\/a>, google gears<\/a>, ria<\/a>, rich internet application<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Stewart blogs about Why do tech journalists get Rich Internet Applications so wrong. I don’t agree with everything he says, especially this one: AIR is a difficult thing to grasp because running web apps on the desktop hasn\u2019t been done before. I suppose there might be a way to define “web apps” that excludes … Continue reading Common misconceptions about Rich Internet Applications<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.itwriting.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}