Just heard a very interesting presentation and (amusing) question and answer period on Renesis, the soon to be released SVG viewer and development platform from EvolGrafix. It was one of the parts of the conference I was most looking forward to (for practical reasons) and I was not disappointed (though it would have been nicer if they had surprised us all and made another beta version available — there was one at one point, apparently, that reached the 1.5 million download mark in only two weeks).

The talk started out with what they see as their business model for developing their suite of tools (which will contain a freely available (as in beer) cross-browser plugin that fully supports the upcoming SVG 1.2 standard). In short, they see “software as a service” as an effective business plan — one that will enable them to release the plugin for free (the plugin should be okay with any valid SVG so won’t have to be used with their non-free products). The presentation then moved into the description of the product (which sounds really great). It ended with a long question and answer period from the SVG experts in audience.

I think it was the longest and most amusing question and answer period I have ever heard at a conference. Unlike many of the presentations, this was really a vendor presentation — not so much of a presentation on a particular project. As a result, there were many claims about what their product will do and, since it will not be released until the end of the year, the experts in the audience were (probably rightfully) a bit skeptical (after all the product claims to have done what many in the XML community have been wanting for awhile now). The questions from the SVG experts ranged from the obvious to some really interesting clarifications of EvolGrafix’s claims.

It was also amusing because it seems that EvolGrafix has not been involved in the W3C and has been vocal about what could be done if the standard was moved along a little quicker than it has been. There was, of course, an invitation from one of the SVG working group members for EvolGrafix to join the group and help move the standard along more quickly (so that it can better compete with Flash — which would be good for any and all implementors). The whole question and answer period had the audience tittering. Quite amusing…

Another interesting snippet from the presentation was that EvolGrafix does not plan to implement any form of XForms (interesting to us in particular because towards XForms is the direction in which we’ve been wanting to move). They see sXBL as the future direction for forms and data binding. I don’t know much about sXBL. From what I gather, instead of having a compound document that might contain an XForm and an SVG image (along with other XHTML), sXBL would allow the binding of data to exist in the SVG component.

Also interesting… Renesis will support interacting with the DOM of the XHTML of the page; it will not, though, if I understand correctly, allow interaction between the SVG and JavaScript in the HTML. This is because Renesis does all its ECMAScript and C# work in its own interpretter (one for each of those languages). Yes, they have implemented their own C# interpretter and JavaScript interpretters (the whole SVG app could be compiled to native code if one wanted to do that — and that is one of the options they see as a possibility further down the line).

This sounds like a huge project and I cannot wait til the end of the year to see if a product is released. If it is, and it really supports the 1.2 spec (and all they have promised) without requiring any proprietary dependencies, this could really benefit SVG’s growth (especially since Adobe will probably be moving more towards Flash with their purchase of Macromedia). One has to take a wait and see approach I think. If it happens, though, this could help push us towards SVG as a viable way to add more interactivity into our web applications.