31 Dec 2007 trs80   » (Apprentice)

The map of the Mozpad universe was recently linked from planet mozilla, and lists some apps built upon XUL and other mozilla technologies. Spicebird in particular looks quite interesting, almost an open source Outlook with an HTML today page (Gecko instead of MSHTML), email and calendaring (IMAP and CalDAV instead of Exchange) and IM integration (XMPP instead of MSN).

This reminded me that it's been over half a year since the RIA buzz peaked, so let's see how the other RIA platforms are going:

Eclipse has a list of open source and commercial RCP apps, although claiming Azureus as an RCP just because it uses SWT is stretching it a bit. There's a fair few AIR apps showcased but the Silverlight showcase requires Silverlight, so who knows how many apps they have ;-)

JavaFX's main competitor is probably Android, so it'll be interesting if it gets marketshare before Android ships late next year (which is also when they've promised the source - until then it's basically proprietory vaporware). Neither seems likely to have an easy time porting to the iPhone.

Also in the realm of "I can't believe it's not JavaScript" is Crockford's HMTL 5 with the nasty bits removed, which might be implemented in IE8 if the scuttlebutt is to be believed.

Prism is more AIR than XULRunner, although in Prism you can use XUL, Java and Silverlight as well as Flash and AJAX. WebKit continues to gain more brainshare, ending up in Qt4.4, epiphany, AIR, Android and the iPhone.

This was originally an email to sogrady, but as I was rereading the comments on the RIA Q&A, I noticed him admonishing me for emailing instead of blogging. Coming soon: an extended blessay on a variety of subjects, with a common thread of change.

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