'Soul of the Web' At Stake'Soul of the Web' At Stake

I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup, which Camp co-founder David Berlind predicted will "trump all other development ecosystems" because it's focused on quickly and easily knitting together the meat of the functionality rather than all the system-level code required in conventional development and computing. "Just as the spreadsheet enabled all sorts of people to become number crunchers, mashups are going to enable a much larger community to become Web developers," Berlind said in his kickoff keynote.

The battle for the Web is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other. The topic came up during a panel discussion on "Why Ajax Standards Matter," which didn't sound too promising going in. Things started getting really interesting when Christopher Keene, CEO of WaveMaker Software, warned, "there's a struggle for the soul of the Web," where rich Internet and Web application development is concerned, and "proprietary engines like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight are coming on strong."Keene asserted that Flash and Silverlight are not searchable or linkable, [without a proprietary browser plug in], "and you can't run them without paying somedody royalties."

Nobody disagreed with Keene, but Berlind noted that Ajax-based development approaches remain far more popular than Flash and Silverlight combined. Nonetheless, the two proprietary development approaches are gathering steam in part because they have the advantage of presenting only one tool set each, noted panelist Jon Ferraiolo, a Web architect with IBM and a director and secretary of the Open Ajax Alliance. That's a big contrast with the chaotic jumble of competing Ajax development environments.

"With Ajax, you have to move up a steep learning curve just to choose the tooling and education sources," Ferraiolo says.

Given that Adobe and Microsoft are tackling problems such as Web application persistence (i.e., operating offline) and data synchronization in a holistic way, Keene extolled the Open Ajax Alliance to move beyond discussions about tiny matters "such as widgets" to solve the really tough problems.

"Open Ajax could win out [over Flash and Silverlight] by offering numerous alternatives and approaches to solving problems," Keene said. "It's not that I think the Alliance should be solving these problems itself. Rather, it should be crowning several victors."

This is a developers' event for the most part (so I'm a bit of a fish out of water among the 200-plus attendees), but it doesn't take a developer to realized that there's a great deal at stake (and fortunes that could be made) around this battle. It's ironic that just up the road in San Francisco, Adobe is gathering thousands of developers at this week's AdobeMAX 2008 conference.I'm here at Mashup Camp in Mountain View, CA, where weighty topics including "the most exciting development environment ever" and "a battle for the soul of the Internet" are being debated. The development environment being discussed, of course, is the mashup... The battle is forming between Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, on the one hand, and OpenAjax on the other.