We are in the process of working on a groovy new interface to our already sweet small business CRM product, InfusionCRM.
Our product is web-based, written in Java – and I was thinking that we should definitely check out the latest craze in the Web 2.0 world – RIA. After some googling, I found that all three of the bigs were cross-platform. So I immediately went to check out some demos. I looked at:
1. Adobe Apollo (AIR)
2. Microsoft Silverlight
3. JavaFX (Poor Sun, I don’t think they ever intended JavaFX to be on lists like this one)
What I quickly found was that (with the exception of JavaFX), what these platforms meant when they said cross-platform was Windows+MacOSX. No Linux, no legacy Mac, no Lindows (How could they leave out Lindows??!!!).
Before I get flamed, I know that Adobe is planning a Linux version, and the people over at Mono are going to port Silverlight, and I really honestly don’t care about RIA products for Linux as a user.
I’m worried about what is means for Linux developers.
Most Web-based Java developers I know (EE and SE) develop on Linux. If the RIA runtime providers aren’t providing runtimes for Linux, what can we expect for development tools? It’s too early to tell right now for sure. Providers are just now coming out with the brand-new 1.0 versions as we speak, and ultimately the market will determine how well RIA runtimes are adopted (will it really make the ubiquitous HTML+Javascript obsolete?).
I for one will be watching very closely!
