By Victoria Ho
Tuesday, June 02 2009 07:28 PM
URL: http://www.zdnetasia.com/news/software/0,39044164,62054596,00.htm

Web development platforms such as Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Air may be capable of letting developers build more visually impressive applications, but businesses are not demanding such rich applications for their purposes, say analysts.

John Brand, research director at Hydrasight, said the current tools on these platforms are "fairly mature", but that organizations are "only just discovering [rich Web apps] now".

"It takes a long time for organizations to work out how they can best utilize a technology and what the specific risks and benefits are," he said in an interview with ZDNet Asia.

Furthermore, Brand said Web development framework, Ajax, is "good enough" to serve most interactive app development needs at present.

Patrick Chan, chief technology advisor, Asia-Pacific emerging technologies research, IDC, too said developers are not moving to Silverlight and Air from the current staple of HTML, Ajax and Flash, because they are able to achieve their goals with the latter.

"There are a multitude of technologies that developers are currently comfortable with... These components need to be recasted to what they can provide, that the older technologies cannot," said Chan over e-mail.

The touted benefits of Silverlight and Air--rich media support and offline desktop applications--will draw developers "when the demand for media, 3D and more engaging user interactivity" rises in future, added the analyst.

Brand thinks enterprises do want rich applications but said development on these platforms has been slow because of a disconnect between visual designers and app coders that has yet to be bridged.

Brand said the skill sets required to develop rich apps in these environments are not suited to the typically "creative environments that content authors need". Microsoft and Adobe have yet to "successfully bridge the 'personality gap' between the highly creative and the highly technical types", he said.

Chan said momentum around cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) will bring more attention to Silverlight and Air, but acknowledged that Microsoft and Adobe will need to help grow the developer and partner ecosystem around these platforms for success. "Much effort in bootstraping developers and software partners is still needed."

Prohibitive licensing costs
Another point brought up was the cost of developing apps on rich platforms. Brand said authoring and distributing in "flat HTML" does not require licensing dollars to be paid, making it more accessible to both developers and businesses which consume the resulting apps.

Rich Web frameworks like Ajax stake a "mid point" between "flat" HTML and rich platforms, leading to Ajax's popularity and increased take up, noted Brand.

"Most organizations and software vendors have to balance cost versus functionality. And yes, existing platforms which do not require much licensing cost, appeal," agreed Chan.

Mark Glikson, general manager, developer and platform evangelism, Microsoft Asia-Pacific argued that developers may find it easier to develop in Silverlight because they can reuse existing .Net code within it.

Glikson told ZDNet Asia enterprises may increase productivity through user interfaces which are more attractive and dynamic, making the apps easier to use, and added that in-house training may benefit from a richer experience.

He said the software giant is expecting more enterprise app development, especially from ISVs (independent software vendors) in the Asia-Pacific region. 15 percent of Microsoft's ISVs are using Silverlight, Glikson added.

He named examples from Asian companies: Samsung built an internal business intelligence (BI) platform incorporating Silverlight to serve 4,000 employees, and China Mobile is using Silverlight for an internal auto-testing application for wireless network performance.

Rob Christensen, Adobe Air senior product manager, told ZDNet Asia there are some 500 Air apps available on Adobe's online marketplace.

Christensen said over the past six months, more developers are creating revenue models around their Air-based apps.

He brought up the example of a recently-updated electronic reader application from the New York Times, which is charged at US$3.45 a week for online subscribers.

He added that the development ecosystem is building around Air. "Most of the major JavaScript frameworks like jQuery, Dojo, Ext JS and MooTools all support Air. Salesforce.com recently announced an update to a toolkit for building Air applications," said Christensen.

The company is also looking to increase support for enterprises wanting to deploy Air, he added.