Dylan Greene dot com

Here's the blog from the person at Microsoft in charge of performance for Avalon (the XAML rendering engine):

http://longhornblogs.com/mmielke/

Some great stuff here, and he wants your feedback.

Cool... you can do XAML today without Longhorn thanks to Xamlon... http://www.Xamlon.com -- Same people (person?) that brought us JRun and several other Java technologies.

Some corrections and questions...

You can sign up for the Flex beta program at:

http://macromedia.com/go/flexbeta/

You can also get more technical details on Flex in the following article on Macromedia's web site:

http://macromedia.com/devnet/flex/articles/paradigm.html

Macromedia has shown the Flex technology at their latest user shows.

Flash UI's: Are they any slower than .Net applications downloaded over the net? I imagine Flex will not need to run in a browser. Look at Macromedia's Central technology for a hint of what is likely to come.

Is Flash slower on non-Windows platforms? Never heard that before, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. I'm curious.

You will be able to run Flex on either J2EE or .NET. J2EE support comes first, then .NET support.

Are the renderers for XAML that you think might be put out by Novell and others in the Open Source community going to be blessed by Microsoft or will Microsoft throw the patent suit on them as soon as they get too close for comfort? Remember, MONO and DotGNU are not supported by Microsoft in anyway. The CLR may be an open standard but the entire .Net framework is not.

I'm not a huge fan of Flash, but I see promise in Flex just because it takes a more open approach than Microsoft. How am I going to run that fancy new XAML app on my non-Microsoft PDA/Cell Phone? I can get the Flex app to run on it. As much as Microsoft wants the world to be Windows only, it's not a reality. You have to play nice with others these days or you're going to get burnt.

1) Slow flash on other systems:

Google, you'll find a bunch of references. Here's one:

"thousands of lines of initialization are being run on the PC in about 5 seconds, the Mac is terrible at handling the exact same code, taking about 100 seconds to execute it."

http://www.glenrhodes.com/macvspc.html

2) FLEX as a "more open approach than Microsoft."

FLEX you are forced to use Macromedia's tools and rendering engine. With the MONO and GotGNU projects you have the freedom of using 3rd party tools and "engines". XAML isn't a public standard today, but I bet it will be soon. Much of .NET is an open standard, but what from Macromedia is?

3) XAML on your PDA/cell phone: Microsoft hasn't said this is going ot happen yet, but I bet the answer is yes. Most PDA's sold today are PocketPCs which can run the .NET Compact Framework. The new SmartPhones have it too. No cell phones can run Flash today, and XAML doesn't require the heavyweight J2EE backend to compile the XML to Flash bytecode.

Dylan: FLEX you are forced to use Macromedia's tools and rendering engine.

Uhhh...there are other tools that produce Flash. In fact, one of Macromedia's main competitors, Adobe, was making a tool that produced Flash files. The Flash file format is open, similar to how Quicktime is. You can have your app spit out Flash source without paying a royalty.

XAML on your PDA/cell phone: Microsoft hasn't said this is going ot happen yet, but I bet the answer is yes. Most PDA's sold today are PocketPCs which can run the .NET Compact Framework.

Most PDA/cell phones are not PocketPCs. Many of these device makers do not care to pay the Microsoft licensing fees so they go with Palm or some other OS.

No cell phones can run Flash today, and XAML doesn't require the heavyweight J2EE backend to compile the XML to Flash bytecode.

Checkout http://www.greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2003-05-07.htm for news on Flash on cell phones.

J2EE runs on the server side for Flex. J2EE is no more heavyweight than .Net is. Remember, both J2EE and .Net are frameworks and both require quite a hefty set of libraries. You need .Net AND Windows to compile and run XAML. Oh yeah, and how many different officially licensed CLR's and platforms can you compile that XAML code on? I can think of a few for Flex running on J2EE. :)

Surely the guys at Macromedia must see a real threat here?

Marc Liron

www.updatexp.com

Making XP a little easier to use...

You mention people STILL using win2k. I own a computer repair

and networking shop in clevelad and it would seem that you would be amazed at how many win95 and 98 machines are out there.I am.

is anyone here how knows

what kind of program i have to have for seen flash files on my pda

Wake up and smell the coffee MS folks. While MS searches for their next star their cash cows die.

MM is forging the future of development.

What about the non-win32 users? How can XAML possibly replace SVG of Flash on the net when it is currently only being targeted to (high-end windows) desktops? They can't seriously be building a web solution that does not work outside of windows... Who will buy a solution that only 70% of their clients can use?

Ronan - there's already non-Microsoft XAML tools becoming available for non-Microsoft platforms. Macromedia could be one of them.

hi! i just wanted to say that macromedia flex is already out even macromedia flex builder. here is the link for u to follow it: http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/

so i hope that the macromedia product which called flex that actually based on flash and flash player to be successful as microsoft product (XAML). because macromedia had done his product in mounth although they haven't so many programmer like microsoft.And in spite of that microsoft needs 2 extra years to do its longhorn (beta xp)...

but you all can think twice about it and changing your mind!

[snip]

FLEX: Vector-based UI described using XML. From Macromedia.

[/snip]

Its MXML...

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FLEX: I haven't seen any demos of FLEX. There is a Developer's site but it only has marketing talk and a Flash-powered Powerpoint-like slide show that is just more marketing talk. There are no demos or sample code on the site that I can find. There is a sign up for the beta, but I just want to see what it looks like right now.

http

[/snip]

Well, you can see the demos at http://www.macromedia.com/devnet/flex/example_apps.html. FYI! you can download the trial version of Flex and Flex Builder(IDE for Flex) from Macromedia website.

[snip]

I assume FLEX is targeted at replacing Windows Forms, Swing, SWT, etc. I assume FLEX is not going to target replacing HTML/DHTML because you wouldn't want the fate of your application to hinged on the user not pressing the Back or Refresh buttons which would cause your application to instantly shut down or restart. You also don't want your users to have to download hefty Flash UI's every time they want to load your product. Anybody else sick of slow-loading Flash UI's?

[/snip]

No, Flex/Flash is not replacing anything. Infact, Flash has been there for long time and many Rich Internet Applications have been created using it. I guess, XAML etc are trying to get into RIA market. BTW! Swing/SWT was never there in RIA space, client side java applications have not been a success, I agree, you can still make real good fast apps in Java, but not many people do that, may be its not that easy.

FLEX is a presentation server for RIAs, which means it runs on server-side, on the top of J2EE/.Net server. Presentation layer is defined using MXML & ActionScript, Flex compiles MXML and serves SWF to client.

Flash player on client side runs SWF. Flex applications have very good support for broswer's back/next & refresh issues. Flex has good caching mechanism, which means MXML is compiled to swf once and swf served until mxml is changed or recompilation is forced. Flash player also doesn't download data everytime from server, it looks the local internet cache and if it finds content on server and client has not changed, it would use local cached swf. Not sure, how things happen in XAML?

[snip]

While Flash is considerably slower on the non-Windows platforms that support it, at least it is available. I haven't done any non-Windows testing of Flash, so I don't know

if it is as bad as Java's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" broken promise ("Test Everywhere" is what it should say), but the idea of software working on multiple platforms is

what makes management happy (more people to sell our software to!).

[/snip]

Flash runs almost at same speed on all the platform. It's much more better than client side java application. I see, XAML going to be slow if different companies would come up with different version of renderers, as you predicted in your post. Same happened with Java, MS came up with their JVM implementation, somebody has different...and client side java apps were slow because of incosistent or different implementations of JVMs.... Which in case of Flash player is not true, because Macromedia is very much

concerned of about users experience, even though SWF is open, Flash Player is not, because MM wants to provide similar/consistent experience at all platforms...which is only possible if only party controls the implementation of runtime.

[snip]

Having seen only chunks of pre-release XAML code in non-real-world demo-only applications, and having seen zero FLEX code because Macromedia doesn't seem ready to show it

off yet, I'm going to make is possibly a crazy stupid silly statement: XAML and FLEX are going to be interchangeable.

[/snip]

As said above,

[snip]

This won't be from Microsoft and it won't be from Macromedia, but somebody will built a XAML to FLEX translator or converter or mapper or XSLT or something. Just because

they both use XML doesn't mean that the job will be trivial, but XML makes the project a lot easier.

[/snip]

This is possible and there are chances, people would do some kick ass hacking.... So lets see...

[snip]

Once this is possible you'll be able to use Flash MX to create your XAML UI's, and Visual Studio to create FLEX UI's. Note I'm not going into what's behind those UI's... in

XAML you use any .NET language, such as C#, J# (basically Java without the name), Fortran.NET, Smalltalk.NET, etc. In FLEX you get to use... J2EE. Ugh... (Find me one

person that knows both .NET and J2EE and has nice things to say about J2EE and I'll remove the "Ugh".)

[/snip]

Yeah, there are guys who have started doing things. Like XAML to SWF, check http://www.xamlon.com, Robin Debreuil built a C#-SWF compiler and he got hired by xamlon guys to make some more good stuff, like XAML-SWF compiler.....

[snip]

I also have no doubt that we'll see XAML renderers from other companies, such as Adobe which could add XAML support to Adobe Reader (check out the very cool Adobe Reader

clone done in XAML demo to see what I'm referrering to.) The non-Microsoft .NET CLRs from Novell and GNU are probably already working on non-Microsoft cross-platform XAML

renderers as well. I have never seen a non-Macromedia program render Flash and I bet we'll never see one render FLEX either.

[/snip]

Answered above, different companies making different runtimes/renderers would lead into problems...SWF format is open and anyone can make their own version of player, but they dont need to do as MM is dedicated to ship top quality Flash player, so people like spending time in right things rather than reinventing wheels...

[snip]

So you've read my predictions... what do you think?

[/snip]

My personal thoughts above....

Wow, thanks Abdul!

For those interested in Flex I've set up a site called CFLEX - Community Flex. Aimed at helping people getting into Flex and trying it out, I've collated various tips and articles. http://www.cflex.net/

Also see http://www.openlaszlo.org/ for an open source alternative to Flex.

And see http://html.xamjwg.org for an open source alternative to all of the above :)

This guys analysis sucks.

Very biased.

Thanks Abdul. You are more objective..

Regards

ok

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