Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

In an article entitled Rich Internet Applications: VM Runtimes or Browser Standards?, Frank Somers at Artima serves up a nice starting point to what I think is a very important and timely debate.

Among the many advantages that browser based apps provide are the following: easy to distribute, powerful, and run on a wide variety of platforms, etc. For these reasons, and more, many developers are looking at RIAs for their next big app. The lines are blurring daily between what "needs" to be a desktop app, and what doesn't - for instance, it's really no longer true that for file operations you need a desktop based app (have you seen Flickr?).

Once you admit that an RIA might not only fit the bill but have advantages, you then have to think about RIA. The crux of that question is Ajaxy (HTML/JavaScript/CSS) or "Browser Standards" as Frank calls it, versus "VM Runtimes" like Flash or Silverlight.

There are pros and cons to each, but I sure prefer the browser standards approach. Along with the general web app advantages browser standards apps also provide, a non proprietary approach, UI and usage concepts that don't change and are familiar to users (back button, bookmarks, form inputs, buttons), widest variety of platform support (every platform the browser runs on, versus every platform the browser runs on AND the VM has been ported too - think Flash versus Ajax apps on your iPhone), lack of a download/install step, and so on.

Actually, my ultimate preference, for now (until browser runtimes themselves get more powerful), is to use BOTH. Do the UI in standards based stuff (Ajax) and then do computation or operations that are faster/better on a runtime, with said runtime (if it is available - and fall back gracefully). A lot of "frameworks" are starting to explore this approach, use HTML/JavaScript UI, and use Flash runtime for speed, file operations, or specialized network needs, for example.

It's a worthwhile debate no matter which side you stand on, I am glad to see it getting more due.