the Onda

So we've got Adobe Air that just went 1.0 this week. Microsoft is coming on from a copy-come-from-behind strategy with Silverlight. Mozilla has got something going on, and Apple has got Webkit at the center of their whole device strategy.

So who wins in the web development platform war for the next decade? Which of these rich runtimes suck the oxygen out of the rich client world and give a nice evolutionary twist to what's been going on with the AJAX spruced applications? Or are Win32 and Cocoa here to stay?

I'm not a betting man, but if I were, it'd be DHTML all the way.

Why? Because at the end of the day we've got to think in terms of access devices. At HP we're living as primary beneficiaries of the move to laptops these days, but just as we've moved there from the desktops, I'm sure we're going to move to the portable devices (iPhones and others) from laptops. And in the case of these portable devices, why would you care about a really rich runtime? What matters is the data and how quickly you can get to it. Sure Air and Silverlight can run in these mobile devices, but the real question is: at what battery cost? And to what benefit?

I'm guessing that the DHTML model has got long legs to it— especially as the world comes to standardize on Webkit and all of the good stuff that comes with it. At Tabblo we've been totally biased towards it; at first because it was the only way to remain truly "platform neutral," and later because of the advantages it has given us in terms of embed-ability within other websites, other online experiences.

If I had to guess I'd say we've got a lot to squeeze from the web browser especially now that we've got a great canvas like Webkit. Even Firefox 3 with its much improved performance gives most of us room for pause as we think about the browser of the future and the world of mobile platforms.

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