Summary: A big step for RavenDB: a new HTML5 Studio. Plus, some thoughts on the move from Silverlight to HTML5 and our experience in the transition.
Yesterday, I pulled the covers off something I’ve been working on for a few months, something I’m very proud of.
RavenDB, the most popular NoSQL database in the .NET world, announced a brand new RavenDB Management Studio, Raven Studio 3.0, built from the ground up using HTML5 and modern web technologies. Yes, we’re moving away from Silverlight and onto HTML5.
Ayende and myself demoed the new Raven Studio just yesterday in a live webinar:
This has been my pet project for the last few months, and it’s something I’m quite proud of! I believe this is a huge step forward for RavenDB (more on that in a minute), and the reception from the Raven community has been awesome, ego-stoking, and totally energizing.
The old Raven Studio was built in Silverlight. Some Silverlight fans have asked, why did we move to HTML5? Are we making a big mistake moving away from Silverlight and to HTML5?
No, on the contrary, we believe HTML5 is a damn good option.
- The RavenDB community wants an HTML5 Studio. This has probably been the most-requested item from the RavenDB community. It came up multiple times in the Raven 3.0 Wishlist, it’s come up whenever Oren talks about the Studio, it comes up when we speak to the external developer community, heck, when I was in Israel for RavenDB training last year, one of the students brought it up right there in the Hibernating Rhinos office. Silverlight has served us well over the years, but Silverlight is a dying technology that our community doesn’t want to be tied to any longer.
- Silverlight tooling is a perceived barrier to Raven adoption. I speak at Code Camps and user groups, and when I speak on RavenDB, the love flows and the excitement grows…until I show Silverlight tooling. I get the raised eyebrow. “Silverlight? Oh. I see.” Others in the Raven community have reported this as well. For some, Silverlight is a stumbling stone.
- HTML5 is a step towards cross-platform Raven. RavenDB is the best NoSQL database for .NET. But, in time, we want Raven to spread her wings and be not just the best NoSQL solution for .NET, but the best NoSQL database, period. Moving to an HTML5 toolset is a step towards this goal.
- The software industry is moving away from plugins. Plugins like Silverlight added abilities you couldn’t do on the native web, such as audio, video, gaming, 2d drawing, documents, voice, and more. Plugins filled these gaps, but with HTML5, these gaps are disappearing. We don’t need Adobe Acrobat plugins anymore to view that high fidelity document. We don’t need Java applets anymore to run that simulation. We don’t need websites built entirely with Flash. And we don’t need Silverlight for Raven Studio. There is little reason today to build something in JavaFX, Flash, or Silverlight: the native web has supplanted them. Just as it’s rare – and often undesired – to see a Java applet out in the wild, so too it will be with Silverlight in the coming years.
- The native web platform is a solid foundation for the future. Microsoft products come and go. 3 years ago, Microsoft was pushing Silverlight as the platform for line of business apps and islands of richness on the web. Today, Silverlight is prevented from running in the default browser of their newest operating systems.
HTML, on the other hand, has been a stable, ever-evolving technology for decades, and because it is the very fabric of the web, things built in HTML live indefinitely. There’s a reason you can still visit and use the 17-year old Space Jam Website.
But your MS Silverlight app from last year? It won’t run even on the latest MS operating system’s default browser.
As a Silverlight developer who has built professional apps (e.g. 3M Visual Attention Service) and spoken at Code Camps and user groups on Silverlight, truth be told, Silverlight is a great developer platform. C# is an excellent language, Visual Studio probably the best development environment.
But, in the words of Miguel de Icaza, creator of Moonlight (open source, cross-platform Silverlight),
“I felt that Silverlight had a bright future, and that it could turn to fill an important void, not only for web development, but for desktop development in general. And this was largely one of my motivators. I am very sad that Microsoft strategy cut the air supply to Silverlight.”
This, coupled with the mobile computing explosion and the software industry’s shift away from plugins, results in a sickly future for Silverlight and Silverlight apps.
RavenDB rocks, and we want the tooling to rock as well. Having our tooling tied to this technology was not an attractive proposition, and it was time for us to move on.
A new technology stack for Raven Studio 3.0
After much deliberation and considering all the options available to us, we moved off of Silverlight.
Instead of Silverlight, HTML5.
Instead of C#, TypeScript.
TypeScript is awesome. TypeScript is new language, a superset of JavaScript designed for building apps on the web. Silverlight fans will be happy to know it’s built by none other than Anders Heijlsberg, the much-respected language designer and author of C#.
In TypeScript, all JavaScript is valid TypeScript code, so it’s familiar to any web developer, but it gives us nice things like an optional, flexible type system, classes, modules, and enums, and features proposed for future versions of JavaScript, but compiles to plain old JavaScript that runs in every browser.
TypeScript tooling is Visual Studio, with all the nice debugging and refactoring that brings, but it can also be written in any text editor and debugged in any browser.
For infrastructure, because we wanted the look & feel of a web application, rather than a set of web pages, we opted to build a single page application (SPA). Durandal.js gives us exactly that: a nice means to load pages on demand and compose them into a cohesive web application.
For UI, Durandal uses Bootstrap for a consistent, pleasing aesthetic, and KnockoutJS for data binding and MVVM.
Using data binding, MVVM, and Durandal makes a great developer experience, one not too foreign to the MVVM stuff in Silverlight. (Indeed, the author of Durandal.js is the same author of the popular Silverlight MVVM framework Caliburn Micro.) Look at the code and judge for yourself; you’ll see classes separated out into small, logical view models, and a clean separation between view and logic.
What has been our experience moving to HTML5?
One immediate, measurable gain was performance:
- Memory usage dropped from 140MB to 20MB.
- Cold starts dropped from ~7s to ~2s.
- Warm starts dropped from ~3s to ~1s.
- General snappiness: XAML is rather heavyweight, and you’ll notice just moving around the application, loading your documents, collections, or editing – it’s all faster in HTML5. Snappy and responsive.
- This doesn’t happen:
- This doesn’t happen either:
A lot of the above we get for free simply by Doing Less Stuff™. No .xap files to download, no dlls to load, no CLR runtime to start, no plugin host process for the browser, no browser-to-plugin communication, no managed code to start executing.
This translates into faster start times and less memory usage.
Another free item we get is JavaScript and the blazing-hot modern JS browser runtimes. The major browsers – IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari – are in a cut-throat competition to get the fastest JavaScript runtime, to squeeze every possible ounce of performance out of JavaScript. You’ll regularly see these browser vendors advertising their JS benchmarks as proof of performance improvement. This is a free win for the new HTML5 Raven Studio: as browser vendors continue to improve their engines in this cut-throat, cross-company competition of speed, Raven Studio will reap the performance improvements.
Moving to the native web platform fixes some plugin-induced workflow hiccups. For example, keyboard shortcuts: Silverlight and other plugins eat the keyboard. So say you’re got Raven Studio opened, and you want to open a new browser tab, so you hit CTRL+T. Surprise, nothing happens. Why? Silverlight ate your keyboard shortcuts, your browser never received them, and your workflow was just interrupted.
If you’ve ever used one of those old all-Flash websites, or full-page Java applets, you’ve probably noticed some things just don’t feel right. So it was with the old Silverlight Studio. Moving to HTML5 fixes these issues.
Conclusion
Transitioning out of the plugin ghetto and moving to HTML5 has been a delight, but more importantly, it’s good for RavenDB users as we move to a faster, more lightweight tool. It’s good for the future of RavenDB to have our tooling built on the solid rock of the native web.
I understand the Silverlight fans who are sad to see the old Silverlight Studio go. I’m a Silverlight fan myself, I understand their concerns. The most I can ask of you guys is to give us the opportunity to earn your trust. It will take time, but with a faster, more lightweight, stable tool that does what you need and gets out of your way, I believe that trust will be earned.
The new HTML5 Raven Studio is on GitHub and we’d love for you to give it a spin or even contribute to the code. I’m pleased to say we already have had a few contributions since it was released just yesterday. I’m proud of this work, and I really hope you guys enjoy it!