The biggest rival for Microsoft's next-generation Silverlight web technology will be JavaScript, not Adobe's ubiquitous Flash, according to experts speaking at Microsoft's TechEd conference in Sydney on Friday.
"I think that the next 18 months we're going to see a 100- to 1,000-fold speed increase in JavaScript as Google and the guys at Mozilla are going to kick us all in the arse and make our JavaScript jittered," Microsoft senior program manager Scott Hanselman told the audience, days after Google released its Chrome browser, which features faster JavaScript technology.
Jonas Follesø, senior consultant at Capgemini, agreed, saying JavaScript would continue to get speedier and Chrome will become "massively" faster than it is.
"Now Google has stepped up and released a browser with jittered JavaScript and JavaVM, making this really, really, really fast," he said.
The consultant said that whenever he thought people had reached a limit about what could be done inside a browser using just JavaScript, some "cool JavaScript writer" came up and showed him how to do more.
"It's going to be hard to tell if it's going to be Silverlight or JavaScript we're going to use for our applications," he said. "I think in the end JavaScript is going to be a bigger competitor to Silverlight than Flash is."
An audience member questioned the panel of experts later on whether he should "be out buying JavaScript books" now the language had been "put on steroids".
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Harry Pierson, Microsoft program Manager, replied that: "JavaScript is a very odd language for most developers." Pierson said it was more interesting to do higher-level development and if necessary compile it down to JavaScript.
Hanselman had a different opinion, saying that although it was a "freaky, weird language", it was possible to do object-oriented programming. "The JavaScript I used and hated in Netscape 4 is not the same JavaScript we have today," he said. "So yeah, I think you should get some JavaScript books."
Follesø said even if souped-up JavaScript became dominant, he thought Silverlight was going to be big, especially in the enterprise when 'fun' Web 2.0 applications come to roost. "For the intranet, when the users expect the same kind of user experience it's not that easy to really build that stuff in HTML and JavaScript so Silverlight might be a lot easier alternative," he said.
Talkback
In the battle between open-source, standards-based and proprietary vendor-controlled, there will only be one winner. The fact that the vendor in question is Microsoft just adds the garnish.