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For the past eight(8) years Schalk Neethling has been working as a freelance developer under the pseudo of Volume4 and is now the president of Overt Strategy Consulting. During this period he has completed over 300 projects ranging from full web application development to complete branding. As president and lead developer of Overt Strategy Consulting, Schalk Neethling and his team has released a 100% Java standards based content management system called AlliedBridge and business document exchange and review system, called Doc-Central. Schalk Neethling is also actively involved on a daily basis in the open source, web standards and accessibility areas and is a current active member of the Web Standards Group. Schalk is also the co-founder and president of the non-profit The South Web Standards and Accessibility Group, which aims to actively educate and raise awareness of web standards and accessibility to both the developer society as well as business large and small. Schalk also has a long relationship with DZone and is currently zone leader for both the web builder, css.dzone.com, as well as the .NET zone, dotnet.dzone.com, and you can find a lot of his writing there as well as on his blog located at schalkneethling.alliedbridge.com. Schalk is constantly expanding on his knowledge of various aspects of technology and loves to stay in touch with the latest happenings. For Schalk web development and the internet is not just a job, it is a love, a passion and a life style. Schalk has posted 173 posts at DZone. View Full User Profile

Silverlight A Flash Competitor Not AIR Says Kevin Lynch

07.24.2008
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So here you have it, another misconception finally cleared. According to Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO, Microsoft Silverlight is more a competitor of Flash than AIR, Adobe’s desktop runtime for web applications.

As competition goes, interestingly, Lynch sees the Mozilla’s Prism project a much more able candidate. At the cocktail hours at the Adobe event, I had a chance to drill more on Lynch’s competitive landscape views.

  1. With Silverlight, Microsoft really has Adobe’s Flash team on its toes, making sure they stay on top of new features, etc. But as far as AIR is concerned, this is a totally new ballgame where Microsoft is not yet playing. That perhaps explains why the guys in Redmond are spraying some FUD around the danger of using Web apps on the desktop.
  2. Mozilla’s Prism project is a much closer competitor to AIR. However, Lynch quickly dismissed it pointing that Adobe is up to 2 years ahead on the Mozilla folks on the concept of running Web apps on the desktop.
  3. Browsers could also be seen as competing with AIR, especially with plug-ins like Google’s Gears for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you run web apps offline. But Lynch argues that user will be confused with the user interface, as you still will see the traditional Web buttons, toolbars, tabs, etc… in what should be a classic desktop application.

References
Reference: 
SoftDevTube - Misconception: Microsoft Silverlight Competes with AIR
Published at DZone with permission of its author, Schalk Neethling. (source)

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Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
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