Alchemy? who will get the gold and who will get stuck with the plumb?
Steve Gillmor did a very good interview with Adam Bosworth. Adam is surely very bright guy, i'm not sure what project alchemy is (no time to investigate :-)), but it seemed some kind of eventing technology, that allows you to write rich client functionality on a browser. And it seems to include, data caching and some templating technology in order to allow evented code to refresh and update some parts (only some parts) of the screen and some sort of server initiated callbacks to the client. Nice.
This seems a bit worrying to me, all vendors seem to be pushing in this direction (BEA,IBM, Macromedia). Rich applications running on a browser, and what does Microsoft do? stops developing IE and bets everything on Longhorn (and on smart clients until longhorn arrives).
I would love to see Microsoft following this path also, ClickOnce seems to be nice, but i would prefer some multi platform client (unless mono and mozilla manage run .Net inside mozilla). The only thing that Whidbey seems to have in this direction is the Client Callback Feature (been there, done that, never got the t-shirt though years ago).
Wesner Moise's adds his two cents and Phil Wainewright puts it on a not very mildly way, in a post he titles Avalon: Microsoft's microchannel.
On a related note, Google's gmail seems to have started an arms race, and this week Yahoo bought OddPost. Ouch, i wonder how Microsoft will react. We live in interesting times indeed.
The Rich clients vs smart clients and longhorn battle seems to be heating up.