Silverlight Offline and AIR
Date : 2008 03 04 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianA couple of articles from the press came out at the same time. Darryl Taft reported on his conversation with Kevin Lynch and Martin LaMonica published Microsoft to take Silverlight offline eventually.
The intersection is where Kevin answers about Silverlight going offline:
Well, what about an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it?
In order to do it well, your heart has to be in it. And if you look at what we're doing right now with our technologies like Flash and AIR, we're making sure they work reliably across operating systems. So that means Mac and Windows, but also Linux. We're releasing Flash Player now simultaneous for Mac and Windows. It took us a while to get their and now we're doing that, and it's the same core code.
If you look at what Microsoft is doing with Silverlight, they're not actually building the Linux version off the same code base. It's a new code base, which is unlikely to be compatible with the other code bases because it's just not built the same way. So there'll be different idiosyncrasies and we know that will be a problem. So we're really taking a passionate approach to reliability across OSes. And you really have to have that as the core essence of what you're doing or it won't really work that well.
Microsoft says it is coming:
Microsoft does not currently have specific plans to bring offline capabilities to Silverlight, but it's something it will eventually do, said John Case, general manager in Microsoft's developer division.
"It's something that we will want to do," Case said in an interview on Monday. "Eventually, customers will expect us to do it."
Darryl has a lot more meat in his article which asks:
As far as AIR deployment, why not just put it in Flash? But isn't the Flash Player only about a 500K download? Couldn't you just up that a little, as you said bandwidth is increasing? When are you planning to, or are you in fact planning to, open-source Flash? So you said Tamarin was a first step. Does that mean you're going to do a second, third, fourth step and so on until Flash is fully open source? I've watched this ongoing competition between Adobe and Microsoft. What do you think they need to do if they want to one-up AIR? Well, what about an offline Silverlight capability? Would that do it? So how do you address the criticisms about security with AIR? You mentioned support for Linux with AIR. Can you expand on the importance of Linux for you guys and where you're headed with it? Who is better at designer/developer workflow, Microsoft or Adobe? Do you concede that to them? What's the status of the Adobe relationship with Google about Google Gears? Do you have any plans to do an AIR-based browser?NOTE: I had a couple of opinions on the issue of open source wrt Gears and AIR