Undoubtedly you have heard about the great RIA war raging between Apple and Adobe. Apple claims that HTML5 is all you need for web applications and Flash has no future. Adobe shoots back that Flash is the best choice today and claims (not entirely convincingly) that it will remain relevant 5-10 years from now. So how do we make sense of this brouhaha as it relates to our own work designing SaaS and Rich Internet Applications for the Enterprise?
The enterprise desktop of 2010 relies on non-HTML5 desktop browsers
Regardless of what the future will hold, the reality is that in 2010, there is an enormous installed base of IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8 on the desktop - particularly in the Enterprise (with governments typically frozen on IE6!).
Consequently, for Rich Internet Application design work intended for Enterprise desktop web browsers, it is a non-starter to design solutions that don't run on IE7 at the very least. For this RIA market, HTML5-related technologies (see below) are simply not yet viable.
RIAs designed with Flex for the desktop user
For Enterprise web and SaaS applications, by far the majority of RIA work that we do is in Flex (Adobe's RIA platform based on Flash). It is predictable, has a good development environment, is scalable, and provides good performance.
What about Silverlight?
I should also note that we do a growing amount of work in Silverlight 4, particularly for desktop/surfaces/large display multi-touch and gesture applications.
RIAs on the mobile devices of 2010 = HTML5
But when it comes to mobile devices, it is a completely different story. On mobile devices over 90% of the smartphone and tablet market in the US (Apple, Android, WebOS, Rim soon) use the HTML5-savvy WebKit framework for the browser. Consequently our RIA and UI design work for mobile (smartphones and tablets) is increasingly HTML5 and associated technologies.
Key Features of HTML5 and associated technologies
For those who are interested, I just want to quickly note some of the most compelling aspects of HTML5 and the collection of technologies that almost always go with it (Note: I'm not breaking out which are core HTML5 vs associated tech). This list is not at all complete - it just references some of the things I think have intuitive appeal to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Semantic Tags - for more meaningful markup that is great for search, accessibility and coders
- Audio and Video Tags - for plug-in-less audio and video with native controls
- 2D Canvas and Animations - for rich dynamic Flash-like graphics, animations and effects
- Geolocation/Location Awareness - makes the mobile device's geographic location available to a web application
- Offline Application Caching - cache an entire Web application for offline use so mobile users can access and interact with a Web app even outside of a coverage area
- Web Storage - allows information to pass between pages in a session or even across sessions
- Web Workers - enable developers to parallelize web application tasks for multi-core processors (mutli-core are not yet the standard for mobile devices but probably will be within a year or so)
Android, iPad, iPhone and Beyond
As a rule, Catalyst is technology agnostic. We design applications and UI for our clients using the technology that is optimal for their market and that is manageable by the organization's development team. For web applications intended for desktop users in 2010, this typically means Java, Flex or Silverlight. For applications and web applications intended for mobile users on the iPhone, iPad, Android devices, WebOS, and soon Rim and Nokia, this typically means HTML5 ( with fallback content adaptation for other mobile devices).