IBM Blue Spruce Framework

The race to become the next best thing aside from Ajax is still on. Developers around the world are taking time to develop frameworks and libraries that hopefully will become part of a major application.

As hardware advances, the applications that will compliment the hardware also increase which means it will be continuously pushed no matter how advanced the hardware would be.

Users will also be looking for more powerful applications as they need more information and better interaction from their browsers. Ajax is already there as developers spend considerable time and effort to support this programming language.

Software giants are also coming up with proprietary programming languages for RIA. As of this writing, Microsoft has pushed for Silverlight, Adobe has pushed for AIR and Flex while Sun Microsystems has revamped Java to become JavaFX.

These programming languages have received considerable reviews and they have made progress on how to court developers into using their programming language.

Apparently, IBM is also aiming to become part of the RIA solutions pool. Silently, they are building a platform that would basically rival these programming languages.

Coded “Blue Spruce”, IBM is working on this project for sometime now and should be ready for release in 2010…the release date is still far but IBM has already laid out what it will do and how it will work.

Blue Spruce will most likely be partly framework and partly programming language. At first it is thought as another browser, much like Chrome. However, IBM has clarified this that it will not be a browser but will become a platform for different applications. Instead of becoming a browser, it will become a stage for different applications – much like AIR.

What makes this different from AIR though is that it will also focus on the browser aside from being aggressive on independent platforms.

This will basically give developers an advantage since they will be building applications that might be launched in Blue Spruce as well as different browsers.

Learning Advantage

IBM has placed themselves in a good position in terms of developing an application. IBM has been a while for sometime and has enough resources to develop this type of application.

The good thing about developing applications like this right now is that everyone else has made mistakes and has published about it.

You can learn a lot from these mistakes and will no longer have to go through the pangs of a new application. This scenario is almost the same with Google Chrome.

Their new browser has provided something that was not offered by other browsers. As a result, they are now one of the most recognized new browsers.

Challenges to Blue Spruce

On the other hand, Blue Spruce could be billed as another programming language to the already growing (and cramming) RIA industry.

Silverlight, Flex, AIR and JavaFX are already cornering a specific group of developers. IBM might be too late in offering Blue Spruce and will never be able to persuade more developers.

For now, we just have to wait for additional updates and see for ourselves if the wait for Blue Spruce is really worth it.