“Prediction is difficult—especially of the future”
/Mark Twain/
I noticed that people ask me with increasing frequency: «What to use to write our new on-line application: HTML5, Flash or Silverlight? » on what I invariably respond: «It is necessary to carry out the careful analysis of business requirements to your software in order to answer to this question» that certainly sounds better, than «who the hell knows», but has the same value.
Old kind days, when having written the application for Windows, you could be sure that 99 % of the solvent demand will be met, are irrevocably passing. Now, as in times when dinosaurs were vigorously running on the earth, before absolute domination of Microsoft on desktop, it is necessary to port applications to a set of incompatible platforms: Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, you name it. The thing that doesn’t represent a great problem if you create another primitive client for a social network, turns to huge amount of work when developing unpretentious casual game and becomes the real nightmare when it comes to the creation of corporate software. There are very few people who enjoy controlling identity of constantly changing business logic simultaneously implemented in different programming languages, never mind expenses for support of this zoo that strongly exceed cost of the monoplatform solution. In such situation, it is not surprising that uniform cross-platform development environment became some kind of the «sacred Graal» for the developers which searches cause, perhaps, more holy wars, than searches of original Graal by crusaders have caused.
