The RIA Wars (HTML5 vs Flash vs Silverlight)

While ten years ago the battleground was the middleware, and which platform was the best to build the N tier app whether .NET or J2EE, today the battle has moved to the "thin client". Today the question is more of the type: I want to build a system with a rich content interface, great user experience, supported on as many devices as possible, with a lifespan of several years, which way should I go? HTML5, Adobe's AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight, or HTML+AJAX?

According to Steve Jobs the world is moving to HTML5. To be honest we have to say we like Microsoft's Silverlight platform, and we would love to see extended support on mobile devices for it. It's a platform that will enable programming web and desktop apps with the same object model and flows naturally for developers with a background in .net development. Recent rumors talk about Silverlight being demoed (is that a verb?) on the iPhone by means of using HTML 5 video tag. This could be a sign of things to come, maybe in the future Silverlight to HTML5 will be an IIS feature. Check out this HTML5 sample.

Flash on the other hand is platform that's widely adopted on browsers, but it's getting no love on the iPhone/iPad world. There are some efforts to compile actionscript into Objective-C apps, but seems the reasons are more political than technical, and if the lack of support is confirmed in time, Flash will not stand a chance against HTML 5. But only time will tell.

(this post is the third in a series titled technology watch for 2010)