Microsoft has recently announced the launch of Silverlight 2.0 Beta and Silverlight 1.0 for mobile. The Rich Internet Applications are growing with various technologies enabling development of cross platform, cross devices, cross browser applications. The RIA movement is also heading for standalone web-enabled applications running across many different environments as well as mobile applications.

Let’s look at some of the platforms and technologies which are contributing to development of rich experience for the application users.

Adobe Flex & AIR: Adobe’s Flex is an open source framework for creating rich Internet applications. The applications can be deployed to any web browser with Flash plugin or desktop. Flex is seeing widespread adoption because it is open source and uses flash plug-in as runtime for deploying applications which is available on 90% of the desktops so there is no need for the users to download anything else.

The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross operating system runtime environment for building Internet applications that can be deployed on desktops. It requires AIR to be downloaded on system to deploy applications. AIR applications can work in offline mode and activate further functionalities while connected to the Internet.

See some of the sample Flex applications and AIR applications.

With ubiquitous presence of flash plugins and slick GUI development features, Flex and AIR will provide big market share of RIAs to Adobe.

Microsoft Silverlight: Silverlight is a runtime browser plug-in which needs to be downloaded and installed in to view Silverlight based applications. With Silverlight 1.0 for mobile, it is heading towards deploying the RIAs on mobile devices competing Flex Lite and Flash Lite. Silverlight 2.0 has also introduced support .Net Framework to add more interactivity in the application. However it is yet to offer anything for development of desktop applications. In order to compete with Adobe, the way ahead for Silverlight is to introduce support for developing standalone desktop applications. This type of announcement was expected to come during the MIX 08 but it didn’t.

The powerful .NET framework and Microsoft’s ability to push products to its PC users will see Silverlight gaining more adoption.

JavaFX: It is a family of products and technologies from Sun Microsystems containing JavaFX Script and JavaFX Mobile (a mobile OS) for for creating rich Internet applications. There are further products in the pipeline. The JavaFX Script is an open source project however the compiler, runtime engine, player and future tools are expected to be proprietary. The technology will allow for creating application for browsers, desktops and mobile phones. I think Sun has to come out with more products and detailed information about this technology before it sees market traction.

OpenLaszlo: It is an open source platform for the development and delivery of rich Internet applications. The applications can be either served as Java Servlets or a Flash (swf) file in a browser. Although not many consumer applications have been built with OpenLaszlo, a browser based desktop (Webtop) for files and applications for enterprise have been released.

AJAX: AJAX with its ability to be deployed virtually on any browser is being widely adopted as well. There are certain limitations with AJAX which might keep it behind Flex and Silverlight such as its usage of browser as runtime. The lack of a consistent and controlled runtime results in applications behaving differently with different browsers.

Javascript: It is a grandfathered technology and is currently being integrated in the new technologies. Although Javascript is widely adopted, it has its own limitations with compatibility issues and security vulnerabilities.

Which technology do you think will lead in terms of market share and see more adoption from both developers and users?

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