Bernard Meisler

Currently, all RIA techologies require plug-ins of some sort.

Microsoft SilverLight will be able to run cross-platform, and will require a plug-in download. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)will only run on Vista and XP SP2 (if the user downloads the .NET 3.0 framework, while JavaFX is still in alpha development, but will no doubt require some kind of Java SDK installation. Let’s table discussion of these technologies for now, as they’re not quite practical for widespread development, for reasons I’ll discuss in a future post. For the moment, let’s discuss the currently practical RIAs, which boils down to AJAX and various flavors of Flash.

AJAX requires a Javascript-enabled browser. Not much of a requirement in this day and age, but according to the Counter, as of June 2007, “only” 94% of users had JavaScript 1.2 enabled. Not much you can do AJAX-wise for those who have – for whatever reasons – fear? Ancient computers/browsers? – turned off JavaScript.

Flash movies require, of course, the Flash player plug-in. This can still be problematic for certain clients, eg large corporations tend to standardize software and some are still using Flash 7 – or even Flash 6. But Flash 8 has been out for 2 years now, and the Player adoption is currently 95.9% in the US and Canada (see link below).

Flex requires the Flash 9 plug-in, as Flex is merely an advanced form of Flash – the Flex builder outputs .swf files, just like the Flash IDE. Despite being available for a year, and adoption rates greater than 85% (according to the latest Adobe stats, from March 2007), it’s still a deal-breaker for some clients. The good news is that Adobe has announced that the new version of Flex, Flex 3 (currently in open beta) will still use the Flash 9 plug-in. So, for the first time in any Flash-based product’s history, assuming Flex 3 will be released this fall, the normally requisite player adoption rate of 95% or so (taking as usual about 18 months) will be in place. This bodes extremely well for the adoption of Flex sites once Flex 3 is released.

All of this is somewhat moot (though it still seems poorly understood by clients) as the Flash plug-in is now updated fairly painlessly, almost automatically, through Express Install. Users are no longer required to visit a special plug-in page or quit their browser to update their Flash plug-in. The entire process takes about 20 seconds.

To sum up, for the two currently most popular forms of RIAs, the plug-in problem is…well, not much of a problem. JavaScript and Flash 8 are at about 95% adoption rates, and Flex3 will be as well by the time it’s released sometime in Fall 2007 (that date is my estimate), and you should be able to easily allay clients’ fears of non-compatibility based on the above statistics.