Posts by Bubble Burster

Sun moves like a sloth

Someone said "quit complaining, they haven't even released a toolkit yet!"

Bah! Sun announced this 13 months ago. I've heard more hype for JavaFX then any of the other RIA engines, all which have toolkits, and most with IDEs, today.

Why wait for them? End of 2008? We'll have Flex 4.0 and Silverlight 3 betas by then.

As for how it performs. An anonymous source at Sun had this to say: "no comment" (okay I made that up).

The only thing we have to go off of right now is bubble mark:

http://www.bubblemark.com

My bets are on SL2

I've been using Silverlight strongly for the past 6 months, after JS/AJAX/Ruby/Perl/PHP for the past 5 years.

There is no comparison as far as client side speed, using the Silverlight 2.0 beta vs. JS, from my own personal tests.

The immense amount of manpower we put in at my day job to get YUI/YUI-ext with AJAX, to perform poorly, sucks.

Yes, there are a lot of things that still lacking. There's no decent Monolight for linux yet. There's no developer tools for the Mac, and the Windows ones are behind, compared to Adobe's suite.

But these things are changing. Just last week Silverlight didn't work on Opera. Now it does. Setting up to host on Apache? Took me a minute of google searching and 30 seconds editing httpd.conf to add xaml and xap mime types.

But these things don't matter to 99% of those who will be visiting your website.

A good rundown on Flash vs. SL2 is here:

http://www.nukeation.net/PermaLink,guid,ea198313-623e-400f-be22-82c242b5812c.aspx

PS: Javascript isn't even multi-threaded yet!