Between Ajax and WinFX (XAML).

I'd have to bet WinFx.

Interesting question, because it's the root of the Google vs. MS war.

I'm not so sure XAML will win. The reason is that it will take a looooooong time before it's common and only if there's no competing technology. However there is..

From a technical point of view, it's easy: although I in general ain't that fond of < and his buddy >, I think XAML is superior to the stone-age tech with a new facelift: Ajax: html (uuugghh) and javascript (who wants to develop with that?)

Ah, something very personal to me. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: web presentation technologies are broken when it comes to applications. It's like trying to paint a picture with 4 fingers missing. You can still do it, perhaps, but why would you want to?

Wow, that was a bad analogy...

Anyway, my instinct is that AJAX will survive as a means of improving user interfaces for web sites and your more basic web applications. True, deep, application development will turn toward the path of least resistance.

Users demand state presence, "natural" interfaces, and rich immersion. More so as the technical limitations to providing these things are lowered. It's a competitive environment, and if company A can produce a whiz bang application that looks great and has a better user experience than company B, then company A wins.

It is difficult to produce these kinds of applications with current web display technologies. XAML, et al, is young, but my bet is that it'll be the de facto development technology, both web and traditional, within the next 5 years. I think this will extend to web sites as well, but that'll take quite a bit longer, I think.

When considering application architecture, we should be able to think about it solely in terms of content and transport, and what limitations the transport may place upon that content. HTML, etc, has artificial limits upon it that are present at an architectural level. Nothing can be done to significantly improve the developer or user experience without significantly changing that architecture. Which is why we have XAML, and why Microsoft is obviously betting the farm on it.

Jeff...

....And there was me about to post a detailed post about who I think will win the world cup

(Probably NOT England by the way, but thats a whole new thread!)

I think you've nailed it on the head Jeff - the underlying problem with HTML & AJAX is that of the architecture not being able to support such rich applications. I think MS are wise to not get to drawn into AJAX and ATLAS, and I think that XAML stands a good chance....

MattWoberts wrote:

....And there was me about to post a detailed post about who I think will win the world cup (Probably NOT England by the way, but thats a whole new thread!)

hehe . Well, the match last night against Sweden wasn't that hopeful for England indeed. But then again, what am I say, the Dutchies are horrible as well (except for the first 20 minutes per game )

I think you've nailed it on the head Jeff - the underlying problem with HTML & AJAX is that of the architecture not being able to support such rich applications. I think MS are wise to not get to drawn into AJAX and ATLAS, and I think that XAML stands a good chance....

psst... ATLAS == MS toolkit for ASP.NET + Ajax

I'd love to see MS win this one.

Web development used to be html + something serverside. now its html/xhtml + CSS + javascript + ajax + something serverside + whatever comes next. And then you have to get it all to work/look right on all browsers ... I should have been a windows programmer, at least I'd get paid more

Anyway, MS isn't the only player in the game as Macrodobe has flex 2 in beta which does pretty much the same thing. I see this as a good thing as web developers seem happy to adopt Macrodobe technoolgy and am sure the Flash guys out there will jump on it pretty quickly. This is bound to increase user expectations and will provide the business driver to give MS a shot.

And I'm sure web developers everywhere will celebrate the death of html for web-apps

Cheers

Peter

lad4bear wrote:

Anyway, MS isn't the only player in the game as Macrodobe has flex 2 in beta which does pretty much the same thing. I see this as a good thing as web developers seem happy to adopt Macrodobe technoolgy and am sure the Flash guys out there will jump on it pretty quickly. This is bound to increase user expectations and will provide the business driver to give MS a shot.

I went to take a look at Flex 2 and it looks like it only runs on Java? True? I watched their 30 minute infomercial and they kept saying that version 1.x would support .Net, but I didn't get the impression that 2.0 would do that. I suppose it's really not that big of a deal, but just curious.

Have any of you guys looked at VisualWebGUI?

http://www.visualwebgui.com/

To me, something like that is the future. There is nothing wrong with the current web browers as a client (Ok, sure, Javascript could be made OOP and execution could be speed up), it is just to HARD to develop for compared to Win Forms. So, if I can create Web apps with controls and construct that are as simple as Win Forms and give the same richness to a WebUI, I'm all for it.

After all, isn't that the wole point of ATLAS? To create Rich Web UI's with the same level drag/drop put code in the event handler as WinForms. Web Forms tried it, but they didn't solve the state or client side processing issue.

Heck, when .Net first came out I expected that the "form designer" for Win and Web forms was the same and used the same controls. Was I bummed when I found that wasn't the case.

BOb

Portions (not all) of XAML on Windows Presentation Framework require operating 'outside the sandbox', and therefore will receive scoffs and jeers (rightfully so) from people who want to keep people's fingers out of their computers. The portions that are considered safe are beautiful but not fully functional.

You heard it hear first, the real winner will be AJAXAML, a combination of the safe portions of XAML with heavy javascript.

XAMLAJAX? XAMALAX? JAXAML? AJALAMAX? MAXAJAMAL?

lad4bear wrote:

I'd love to see MS win this one.

Web development used to be html + something serverside. now its html/xhtml + CSS + javascript + ajax + something serverside + whatever comes next...

Wouldn't be so bad if three of the five components (html, CSS and especially javascript) weren't such dogs. Seems to me that any technology that tries to build on top of this stuff is like trying to build castles on sand.

Frans says that XAML is a long way from mainstream and obviously he's much better connected than I am. But based only on what I've seen and tried myself, I would expect (hope) that we'll be employing XAML pretty extensively by the end of 2007.

2 cents.

Jeff

swallace wrote:

...with heavy javascript.

Oh PLEASE no!

jeffreygg wrote:

Ah, something very personal to me. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: web presentation technologies are broken when it comes to applications. It's like trying to paint a picture with 4 fingers missing. You can still do it, perhaps, but why would you want to?

Finger painting?

After developing a large-scale web-app for about a year or so now, I can say hand on heart that I hope M$ wins this one. There are so many issues with html, javascript, ajax:

HTML - Hasn't got enough features, was bastardised early on.

CSS - Just came along to tidy up HTML, but hasn't really moved us on any further, apart from getting closer to an agreement on how to present elements on a page. But still not enough features.

Javascript - God where do I start. Well the main ones is it's dog slow and weakly-typed. It also gives hackers a greater surface area to work with. And is it just me, or does it seem to work in a different way depending on what time of the month it is?

AJAX - Increases the surface area further, and regardless of what people say about it revolutionising web-sites, I'm still not convinced. It's not pretty, and the endless 'Loading...' tabs I think will be more annoying to users than page-refreshes. At least with a page-refresh something starts happening straight away. When I started putting Ajax into my app it felt slower a less responsive. It wasn't, it just felt like it because of the 'Loading...' sign.

I haven't looked at XAML fully yet, after looking at the demos I am certainly very intrigued. I'm going to start doing a bit of research into it for a possible version 2.0 of my current app.

Has anyone on here installed the SDK etc and created any apps? How have you gotten on?

louthy wrote:

I haven't looked at XAML fully yet, after looking at the demos I am certainly very intrigued. I'm going to start doing a bit of research into it for a possible version 2.0 of my current app.

Has anyone on here installed the SDK etc and created any apps? How have you gotten on?

Yea, I've been messing with it for a litle bit. Don't even bother to use the designers they have for it. You'll lose the better training opportunity anyway by doing it in code.

It's got a ways to go yet, in terms of duplicating the functionality in line-of-business, data-entry-heavy apps, mostly in terms of native visual control support. But the framework is hugely powerful, with plenty of potential. It's just that this is such a huge paradigm shift for MS, and they have such a large amount of value already available in the Win32 controls, that I think v1 will probably be a little shaky in terms of ease-of-use, comparatively speaking.

That being said, the value curve will be very steep and we'll start to see new applications blowing the doors off the old ones very quickly.

I think the big problem in terms of web apps is that of consistency. I think one of the big benefits to web apps is that they all look pretty much the same. Users know what to expect. There's a lower learning curve that applies across the web for users once they understand how the browser, and the web in general works - the paradigms they're used to. Once XAML comes in to play, designers will be free to design rich applications deliverable on the web and they'll all look completely different from each other. Beautiful, but different.

It remains to be seen whether this is a tragic flaw inherent in this new wave of design paradigms. Will consumers (as opposed to corporate users) adapt to an environment where Amazon's shopping cart looks radically different than Buy.com's?

Jeff...

jeffreygg wrote:

Will consumers (as opposed to corporate users) adapt to an environment where Amazon's shopping cart looks radically different than Buy.com's?

Good question. The consistant look-and-feel of B-to-C websites is probably due to the fact that B-to-C websites are largely alike. I.e., (1) review item, (2) place item in cart, (3) review order (4) odds-and-ends (such as shipping) and (5) payment.

B-B websites have FAR more sophisticated requirements that html/javascript struggle to fulfill.

Since Internet-enabling the B-to-B market has barely gotten off the ground (can you name a B-to-B web-based application that rivals the popularity of B-to-C sites such as Amazon and e-Bay?) I'd have to conclude that there is a huge opportunity for that space.

I've always believed, and still do, that the market value of B-to-B Internet applications will dwarf the B-C market.

Jeff

The Miami Heat won.

jeffreygg wrote:

It remains to be seen whether this is a tragic flaw inherent in this new wave of design paradigms. Will consumers (as opposed to corporate users) adapt to an environment where Amazon's shopping cart looks radically different than Buy.com's?

I see your point, and it was one of the reasons why I wanted to do a web-app in the first place. As a fair number of my user-base are technically inept, however most of them can book a cheap flight online. Web-apps have that instant familiarity with users, they understand that underlined text leads to another page. I think any developer/development-house with any common-sense at all would be foolish to go away from that. But at least with WinFX you have the option to do a bit more on the client, and to make the system less 'clunky'.

It seems everyones keen to roll-out AJAX API's for us all to make web sites/apps better and richer for the client, but they're all totally different Whats that about?! Its hard enough making web apps look decent without having to add 100 different AJAX API's to the equation.

I'm happy as a computer user to see new sites popping up that look nicer and work nicer too, its been a long time coming. But i just hope that we resolve the underlying technolgies soon and come to some sort of standard, the choice at the momemnt is bewildering.

I'm totally guessing here, but I get the impression that ATLAS was something MS were more or less coerced into doing, not something they always had planned. I think for MS that XAML will be the bigger push, and with AJAX APIs in the state they're in right now, XAML will win.

Having said all that, I used to think that England would win the world cup, so it shows what I know

MattWoberts wrote:

I'm totally guessing here, but I get the impression that ATLAS was something MS were more or less coerced into doing, not something they always had planned.

Yeah I think you're right on this one, wasn't it an off-shoot of their upgrade to hotmail (to make it more like gmail)?

All this talk of WinFX got me interested, so I downloaded the sdk etc yesterday and started having a play with it. It certainly looks very nice indeed. Obviously it's got some time to go, as it's still a bit rough around the edges, but this is definitely what I'm looking for.

It makes me glad that I'd abstracted my system to use my own xml page description system when I started my web-app (rather than using the aspx's and vs.net designer). It should mean moving over to something like XAML will be quite straight-forward