With Adobe’s announcement today that they’re opening up the source of their Flex SDK under the Mozilla GPL, they’ve gained a little more ground in the burgeoning competition between rich Internet application runtime environments. While I’m still learning about all this new technology, I’m starting to get the feeling that the “Browser Wars” are history and the “Runtime Wars” are just getting started.
There are some heavy hitters in the tech industry spending a lot of time on these new runtime environments. Microsoft has just announced Silverlight. Mozilla is incorporating offline capabilities into the upcoming Firefox 3 release. And of course, you’ve got Adobe Apollo. Each has its strengths and weaknesses, which I’m currently learning about. But all of them will be players in the next phase of the Web, when rich Internet apps take center stage.
The browser model is on its way out, with the burden of processing headed client-side. It will probably take a couple of years to get there, but I think that’s the direction we’re headed. Check back here for news and thoughts about the revolution.
