Sliverlight and Google Gears and AIR

Once again, it seems to the battle of the giants. Two fronts - Google vs. Microsoft. Competing technologies - Google Gears vs. Silverlight.

Both being browser based plug-ins to enable rich and compelling cross platform client experience. The grand vision is to use the web and desktop so seamlessly that the boundaries get blurred. But looking closely that's where the commonality ends.

Microsoft Silvelight(tm) seems to be more targeted towards delivering the rich client interface, a easy programming paradigm offered by Windows Presentation Framework (WPF) to the browser. Currently version 1.0 and 1.1 in pre-alpha, the vision is expected to be delivered to early 2008. Having said that, the developer tools available to enable Silverlight comes with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or a separately licensed tool as Microsoft Expression. Of course, this being true as I understand it now. Things may change as we get closer to release.

Google Gears on the other hand is shot at the basic limitation of a web hosted/delivered application. The limitation being, that web application DO NOT work offline. Google Gears provides components such as LocalServer, Database and WorkerPool to make the experience of being online or offline indistinguishable.

There is a third front too... from Adobe. While Microsoft Silverlight is intended to launch attacks into Adobe Flash (or latest avatar Flex) niche of compelling graphic content on the web, Abode has its eyes set on helping their loyal user base capture the desktop with AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime).


All of these technologies use AJAX in some form or another and are founded on delivering updated content from the web.

It remains to be seen if any one of the destined to dominate the web or the developer community will find a way to leverage all these technologies to benefits the user. I can very well imagine an application which will user XAML to deliver content to AIR and where Google Gears is used to store local information which syncs with the backend when connected. But can the competitiors?