Making a Reach vs. Rich play here is something we constantly weigh daily. The underlying reason as to why folks are aok with applications via browser is they are assured that this won't cause virus breakouts, privacy attacks and so on. That and it has a much smaller footprint when it comes to set operating environments within enterprise environments (big and small).
The moment you start breaking open the sandbox and mutating a runtime into a desktop like experience, is the moment you start accounting for every developer focused scenario (eg copy & paste is no trivial task) how painful this solution is likely to be for customers and what the risk is. Adobe AIR is facing this now, and I've been told at MAX that they're basically making moves to drop the mutated sandbox and provide unrestricted access to the client, if this happens all bets are off (ie if it were to occur, API forking, Security Risks etc) The reason for mentioning this is not to dump all over Adobe, but to highlight the delicate nature of what it means to live in a comfortable browser based sandbox free of risk vs. providing access to native operating system level capabilities on all platforms. With power comes a lot of responsibility, and it's something we've put more investment into ensuring the WinForms/WPF/XNA etc model is tightly secured and has 10+ years of maturity behind it. Scott. ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Sam Lai [[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, 31 December 2008 4:58 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SL in Offline World > well, it slots nicely into an N-tiered environment. While I used to > get away with small VB5 apps having the UI talking directly to the > database (using DAO - shudder), it wasn't really very flexible. See the thing is, I'm trying to use AIR not to build RIAs, but rather cross-platform desktop apps with spiffy interfaces. I don't have the luxury here of client/server architecture and the ability to use something else for the backend (the .NET/Java proxy aside, which doesn't have a very good deployment story). There isn't much else out there with the ease and features of AIR for desktop apps, which is annoying. As an RIA platform, which is what they're focusing on, it's great. But it's got so many attributes that would make it a good desktop app platform too, and is so close, yet so far from being about to do that too. But hey, desktop apps are dying slowly right? :) > Mono was mentioned before as a way of getting around having > non-windows clients: maybe I'm far too conservitative or afraid, but I > find it really hard to embrace Mono. True, but you have that problem even with platforms where the apps are supposed to be cross-OS compatible due to inherent differences between OSs, e.g. Java. Granted the likelihood might be less, and it all depends on the features you leverage, but then I'd expect simple apps to work fine between .NET and Mono also. It isn't an ideal situation, but it's probably the best solution possible realistically - the chance of seeing a Microsoft supported release of .NET on Linux is minuscule :) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- List address: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- List address: [email protected] Subscribe: [email protected] Unsubscribe: [email protected] List FAQ: http://www.codify.com/lists/ozsilverlight Other lists you might want to join: http://www.codify.com/lists
