InfoWorld's Test Center chief technologist, Tom Yager, sometimes gets a little carried away in his enthusiasms, at least from where I sit. His deification of Adobe AIR in his recent posting AIR gets rich apps right is one of those cases: I'd go so far as to say it's a little over the top, even for Tom. Right up front, let me say that I like AIR. It's a clever way to allow Flash and Flex developers to create desk InfoWorld’s Test Center chief technologist, Tom Yager, sometimes gets a little carried away in his enthusiasms, at least from where I sit. His deification of Adobe AIR in his recent posting AIR gets rich apps right is one of those cases: I’d go so far as to say it’s a little over the top, even for Tom.Right up front, let me say that I like AIR. It’s a clever way to allow Flash and Flex developers to create desktop applications using their existing skills. I’d recommend it to those folks. But there I stop.Tom’s first assumption is that browsers of necessity fall short when used on the desktop. That needn’t be the case. I have been shipping browser-based applications that look and act like Windows desktop applications for awhile now without any need for Flash or AIR. Start with a shell program written in C++, and let it host a Web browser control like MSHTML. Nobody really needs to know that you’re using the IE engine under the covers. Write ordinary Web pages using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and use the scripting object model that Windows exposes to local applications. If that isn’t enough, add an ActiveX control, expose whatever interfaces you need for scripting to an authorized client, and have full, safe, access to all Windows APIs. Tom’s second assumption is that browser plug-ins are dreadful. Yes, they can get out of hand, and they certainly aren’t all wonderful, but well-written browser plug-ins in the right hands can make a Web page sing, not to mention dance. Of course an overloaded Web page can bog down, but you don’t need to combine technologies to do that: one cheesy multimedia ad can do that all by itself.Tom shudders to think what would happen were Silverlight added to the mix. Having played with Silverlight quite a bit, I can say that Silverlight will not end the world as we know it: in the right hands, Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, really dances and sings. Can a clumsy developer make a page bog down with Silverlight? Of course. But we’re not talking about clumsy developers: we’re talking about craftsmen teamed up with artists.I like Silverlight. It’s a clever way to allow .NET and WPF developers to create rich Web applications using their existing skills. I’d recommend it to those folks. And there I stop. Software Development