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Volta: Microsoft's GWT Clone
Sun, 12/09/2007 - 16:55 — kebernet
MS has release Volta. Looking at it, it is, well, GWT for .Net. That's pretty much it.
Volta does do a couple of interesting things. First, you can deploy your Volta app as a standard .Net app. I am assuming it is doing this through embedding IE, rather than creating a DOM-based UI Toolkit. Reading the Marketese, it sounds like it actually offers some more targets compilations -- to .Net or Silverlight where available, with a fallback to JavaScript. This, of course, makes sense since MSIE's JavaScript performance totally blows.
I would say that I would play with it, but since it requires VS.NET 2008 (which I don't have) I likely won't.
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Volta
Yeah, it's a little more than just an HTML/JavaScript/CSS cross compiler, or so it seems from the marketese as you note. Looks like it can burn portions to JavaScript, or to CLR clients, etc.
The analog in GWT terms would be the ability to delegate some portion of your app to an applet, etc - I guess.
In my opinion though, this is a good move from MS, though I don't personally think it will ever approach GWT goodness (it's a losing battle, especially now that GWT is open source, hard to compete with those resources). And, the entire reason I have come around to Ajax is that I *want* the native in the browser running app, I don't want an applet, a silvercrap, a flash movie, or whatever the hell, running in a separate process.
If Volta had been released
If Volta had been released two years ago it would have been revolutionary. At this point, though, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Google and Adobe. Volta also sends a confusing message to .NET developers targeting the browser. Silverlight 1.1 is supposed to include a full .NET environment inside the browser for multiple platforms. Now with Volta you can get “the illusion of” the same thing without a plug-in. So why do you need Silverlight?
Another concern developers will have is Microsoft’s commitment to browsers other than Internet Explorer. If, for example, a new browser or operating system came out that broke GWT, then the source code is available so you could fix it yourself if Google’s GWT team wasn’t fast enough. That’s not an option with Volta.
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Fair Volta points, but I
Fair Volta points, but I don't think it could have come out two years ago, because once again Microsoft did not innovate, I don't think, rather they copied (the approach, not the code). Which makes sense to me, but it appears (per what reviews of Volta have stated thus far), that they also did a crappy job of it - it doesn't trim unused stuff, etc.
I think Ajax is here to stay, regardless, and so it makes sense for MS, and others, to be looking at the same approach GWT innovated and put forth.
Running in a browser *without* a VM for Flash/Silverlight/YouNameIt will matter. That is how my GWT apps run right not on my iPhone, and my Wii, for example. The VM thing just can't keep up - and as the amount of widgets and offline and so on start to increase for browser based apps, the lines will blur even more.