Last Wednesday we had another trendspotting meeting at Dynabyte where we discussed Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The discussions revolved primarily around three main topics – “HTML5 today”, “The future of HTML5?, and “Rich internet application platforms”. In total we were eleven participants attending at the meeting. Most of the people participating had general experience of web development but only one or two had actual professional experience with a RIA platform (such as Flash or Silverlight). Therefore the discussions were held on a higher theoretical level rather than focusing on pure technological and practical issues (even though a few topics like the capabilities of websockets and the possibility of 3d accelerated OpenGL briefly found their way into to the discussions).HTML5 today. We opened the discussion by taking on the current state of HTML5. It seems like every time HTML5 is discussed it’s inevitable to include the video tag and this time was no exception. Of course, this is not that surprising since most of the Flash we come across nowadays on the web is mostly video players. Aside from straightening out the hows and whats about the video tag, like how it is actually meant to work and what codec it will use, a lot of interesting questions and ideas were raised about how you might be able to take advantage of the fact that the player will no longer be constrained to its “plug-in sandbox” and instead be naturally integrated into the page itself. Being able to control and interact with videos more freely will definitely pave way for some very interesting possibilities. Another big issue about the current state of HTML5 standard that was discussed is the beloved and loathed JavaScript. Some of the participants expressed a certain anxiety about whether this was the best and most suitable language for developing applications in. After a few minutes of a heated argument about performance and general syntax we all agreed on that in comparison to a lot of other languages JavaScript is pretty well suited for the task and the performance has and probably also will continue to improve with later releases of browsers. Perhaps most the client side logic will not actually be authored in JavaScript but instead exported or compiled from your own language of choice. The future of HTML5. The main purpose of HTML5 is to minimize the need of proprietary platforms which have now claimed a large piece of the web. More bluntly put, the mission of HTML5 is to put an end to all the proprietary RIA platforms such Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX, etc. Everybody in the group was in agreement on that this will indeed happen sooner or later. To make a more qualified guess to when this will happen the question was rephrased to “what will be our first HTML5 project?”. The first thing that comes to mind is a customer who would request the kind of functionality that HTML5 will leverage such as a lot of client side logic, high level of interaction, and rich graphics like an advertisement agency or an estate agent (i.e. the same type of customer that would request a Flash application today). However, HMTL5 doesn’t support any type of functionality that the current RIA platforms already don’t have so in the end it will always come down to reach. How will the application be able to reach as many end customers in the targeted group as possible with the least amount of resources spent? If you only get to chose one platform the customer will most likely chose the platform with the biggest reach. Today only some of the web browsers support HTML5 to a limited extent and the most popular browser (IE) has so far been restrictive in the adaptation of the standard. Therefore it will probably be at least few years before we have our first customer requesting development of a RIA in HTML5. RIA platforms. No one in the group seemed to have any high hopes for the future of the current RIA platforms. HTML5 will sooner or later succeed with what it has been set out to do but it’s hard to imagine Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft to just back down and admit defeat. In a future scenario when HTML5 has been well established and has a high enough reach neither of current RIA platforms will barely be able to do anything that you can’t achieve through HTML5. The group suggested that if Adobe wanted to maintain its position on the RIA platform market it should start focusing on creating a HTML5 IDE and/or framework rather than trying to keep flash alive as long as possible. A few days after the meeting I stumbled across this two month old post (http://www.9to5mac.com/Flash-html5-canvas-35409730) showing how you can actually export Flash into an HTML5 canvas in the new Adobe CS5 (well, at least it shows we got that one somewhat right ;-)). Adobe might not be able to keep Flash, Flex, and Air alive forever but with all the applications running on these platforms out there and since theHTML5 specification isn’t expected to reach W3C recommendation stage for at least a couple of years, I don’t think they will disappear that quickly either. Not a whole lot of faith was put in the other platforms with the small exception of Silverlight which might be able to make it a little longer much thanks to Microsoft’s loyal community of developers and well integrated support in Visual Studio. As a side note the question was raised about who will make money on RIAs in the future. Someone promptly shouted out “Google!” followed by a series of laughter. Google has surely taken a steady grip on the market and since Google chooses to both support HTML5 at a great extent and continues to work with the RIA platform companies (though engagements such as the Open Screen Project) at the moment Google seems to be the only one who will win whether RIA platforms such as Flash and Silverlight continues to live on or if HTML5 will succeed in its goals. Be sure to check back later as the next trendspotting event will take place in late August!