Even though this blog mainly focuses on Oracle related technologies, in the last few months I’ve also written about Adobe Flex. This is because i think rich graphical web user interfaces are going to become very important in the future.
Currently the Oracle world is mainly focussed on structured data, both entry and retrieval, using html. In this area JSF and ADF Faces are good solutions, but already Oracle is adding support for flash in ADF Faces to support graphs. Currently this is limited to graphs based on data.
Oracle also knows that the growth is in non structured data: sound, imaging, video, etc. A lot of effort is invested into making the Oracle database the best place to store all this data. For example, the secure files feature which is planned for 11G. This will allow you to put unstructured data in the database, without a performance penalty. Accessing a video in the database will be as fast as accessing a video on the file-system.
With all this unstructured data comes the requirement to create user interfaces which enable you to take benefit from all this data. And in this area JSF and ADF Faces are currently not strong contenders. Flex is one possible solution. At the Mix07 Microsoft has just announced another solution: Silverlight using a cross-platform mini-CLR. For Java developers it sounds like a copy of the Java applet technology: a CLR plugin for your browser, but with all the libraries to create rich media applications. The size of the mini CLR is about 4Mb, so i think it’s smaller than the JRE required to run Java applets. But more importantly, silverlight is supported by a lot of tooling and frameworks required to create graphically rich multimedia user interfaces. This video gives a nice impression of what can be achieved with this technology: Top Banana.
It is clear that there’s a requirement for this kind of technology, and in it’s current state JSF isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be interesting to see what happens, and what Oracle is going to do to provide you the tools to build rich multimedia user interfaces. As I’ve stated before: Flex might become the Java of the rich user interface. Adobe is already following Sun’s example by open sourcing parts of the technology, but i think they’ll also need to opensource the runtime to create acceptance among all the developers who choose not to use Microsoft. On the other hand, the flex runtime is already available in 95% of all browsers, it remains to be seen if Microsoft can achieve this with Silverlight.
More info on silverlight:
* TechCrunch- Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer,
* TechCrunch – Why Silverlight Is Important,
* Tim Sneath – Introducing Microsoft Silverlight, Silverlight screencasts,
* Microsoft “rebooted the Web” yesterday,
* Mix 07 Ray Ozzie Keynote – Winforms apps are dead,
* What is Silverlight, really?,
* Miguel de Icaza – Mix 07, Silverlight, Dynamic Languages Runtime and OpenSource,
* Is Microsoft Silverlight THE Flash Killer?.
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:27:42
[...] Original post by Andrej Koelewijn [...]