I’m speaking on Silverlight at the The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, CA. At the last minute, I was pulled into a panel discussion that kicked off the conference. It was a fun panel. There was a editor from InfoWord named Paul Krill who wrote a fantastic article on InfoWorld.
There were representatives from Microsoft (me), IBM (Jon Ferraiolo), Yahoo (Bill Scott), Ryan Breen (VP of web testing company Gomez) and many consultants including Scott Davis and Stuart Holloway. The panel was run by Neal Ford (ThoughtWorks). Neal threw out the question designed to bait the panel, “Ajax, Flex, Silverlight – who’s going to rule the world?” I thought just for a moment about jumping up on the table and yelling “Silverlight!!!” but I thought that’s probably not the introduction I needed to the crowd so I waited. There were several of the guys that said that stepped up for AJAX because of the ubiquity factor. I stepped up for Silverlight/Flex talking about the continuum of experience from ubiquitous lowest common denominator web applications supplemented web to platform optimized. Silverlight/Flex fill that spot in the middle. It was fun to be the guy on the panel that was answering all of the Flex questions as well as the Silverlight questions. People asked about testability, accessibility, tooling and more. I had fun and was really happy that I had attended the RIA Jam in Crested Butte. I was also thrilled, with the crowd that we had in attendance, to announce the Moonlight project news. The whole panel went really well.
Rich Web technologies debated | InfoWorld | News | 2007-09-06 | By Paul Krill
*Update – ComputerWorld picked up the article – http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9035018&source=rss_news10.