Ajaxus place on the net

Adobe today will bolster its “Platform for Rich Internet Apps” with the full release of a trio of developer tools. Each of the tools Adobe is releasing is either free or open source. Along with the boost to Adobe’s RIA platform, a number of companies are also announcing applications built on Adobe’s cross platform system runtime, AIR.

Perhaps the most significant of Adobe’s announcements is that their much-touted desktop runtime for Rich Internet Apps, AIR, is coming out of beta about a year after being announced. The final release will be free on the AIR web site for Mac and Windows (with Linux support promised in “upcoming versions”).

Along with AIR, Adobe is also announcing the final release of Flex 3 and the Flex Builder. Flex is an open source framework for building applications on the Adobe Flash and AIR platforms, while Flex Builder is an IDE for Flex. The Flex 3 SDK comes out of beta today and is released under the Mozilla Public License on the Flex web site.

Flex, Flash, and AIR form the cornerstone of Adobe’s “Platform for Rich Internet Apps,” a complete end-to-end solution for creating and deploying RIAs to the web and desktop. This has been a big year for the RIA platform at Adobe, according to Adrian Ludwig, the group manager in the company’s platform and development unit.

Ludwig told us that 2007 was a “real turning point for the industry” and that Adobe saw broad based adoption of their RIA platform. Oracle, for example, is using Flex to create interface elements for applications, while Adobe has worked with BEA to comarket Flex Builder along with BEA’s own developer tools. The wide adoption of Adobe’s RIA technologies “was confirmation of the value that these types of applications have,” said Ludwig.

At DEMO this year, Ludwig told us, there were three companies whose entire business was built on Adobe AIR. Considering AIR debuted just over a year ago itself at DEMO (as Apollo), that is fairly amazing. In just a year, Adobe’s runtime has matured enough that entrepreneurs are willing to build entire businesses around it — even when AIR has been in beta until today. “That, combined with our commitment not just to innovation, but to open source technologies where it makes sense,” said Ludwig, “I think that’s going to really further innovation and advancements in the RIA space.”

Along with the new releases of Flex and AIR, a number of companies are announcing public releases of AIR applications, including Nickelodeon, eBay, AOL, Nasdaq, and the New York Times Company.

Adobe is also releasing the final first version of Blaze DS under the GPL license. Blaze DS was announced two months ago and is a server side remoting and messaging technology that was previously only available as part of the LifeCycle suite of products.

The attraction to Adobe’s platform makes a lot of sense. They offer an end-to-end solution, and Flex and AIR makes the question of desktop vs. online a deployment decision, and not a development decision. Write the application once in Flex, and deploy to the web or to the desktop with AIR with very few code changes. That sort of flexibility is very attractive to many developers.

Today at .Net Developers Journal was posted this interesting article by Judy Lee. Check it out here as Judy makes fast comparison of these products related to their projects. At the bottom is the final conclusion table.
Today, RIA technology is widely used, also referred to as Rich Internet Clients (RICs). RICs provide the usability, responsiveness, and reuse of client/server applications with the deployment, manageability, and availability of a traditional Web application. Many websites are using DHTML and AJAX technology in HTML pages. Another very popular technology is Flash. How about Silverlight, though?

RIAs offer the flexibility and ease of use of an intelligent desktop application, and add the broad reach of traditional web applications with an entirely new kind of web experience that is engaging, interactive, lightweight, and flexible.

DHTML and AJAX

We used DHTML and AJAX technology in HTML pages in some of our .NET outsourced projects. However, we encountered problems of browser incompatibility. (For example, DOM is quite different in IE and in Safari.)

Although it is possible to make this kind of web application work in all browsers, it will take the developer much time and it is very difficult to maintain when the browsers update.

Flash

Another very popular technology is Flash, it doesn’t have any browsers compatibility problems, but it’s very hard to integrate with .NET. Integrating Flash demands that .NET developers make a special effort, and since our specialty is .NET software outsourcing, Flash is not the best choice for us.

Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross browser technology, so there’s no browser compatibility problem. Plus it integrates with .NET very well, so it is easier to use and develop. Silverlight does not have controls at present, but in version 2.0, many controls will be released for Web designers. Those controls will make Web development easier and faster.

Based on the features supported by Silverlight (see our chart below) more web page elements and properties can be controlled than DHTML&AJAX. Silverlight also offers a good user experiences.

Source

We’re all living on the web, and we all seem to be starting our own websites, so it’s time we all learned the languages that make it run. The guys at Mashable.com have gathered over 250 resources to help you get going.

This list is aggregated from previous Mashable posts.

The list is quite extensive and features many ajax libraries, loading indicators etc so its best to be viewed at the original place.

Scot is as always providing quality posts on the actual topics:

Last Monday I delivered one of the keynotes at the MIX conference in Las Vegas, and discussed a new project that I’ve been spending most of my time working on over the last year: Silverlight.

Silverlight is a cross platform, cross browser .NET plug-in that enables designers and developers to build rich media experiences and RIAs for browsers. The preview builds we released this week currently support Firefox, Safari and IE browsers on both the Mac and Windows.

To get a sense of the types of rich browser applications you will be able to build using Silverlight, please check out this 7 minute video of the Metaliq “Top Banana” video editor sample application:

The “Top Banana” application was built with C# and runs cross platform on any system where Silverlight is installed. The total download size of the application (meaning the size of all of the XAML + compiled code when a user types in the URL of the site) is only ~50kb. We’ll be shipping a source-code version of the application as a sample later this summer.

Yesturday at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference (NAB2007), Microsoft Corp. unveiled Microsoft^® Silverlight™, a new cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.

Microsoft Silverlight, previously called Windows® Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), integrates with existing Web technologies and assets to provide higher-quality experiences with lower costs for media delivery. Delivered to end users through a seamless, fast installation, Silverlight offers consistent experiences to both Macintosh and Windows users on a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer®, Firefox and Safari.

view Silverlight web site
view press release

Today I came across this great article by Rick Strahl called “Beyond HTML: Rich Internet Applications”. He gives pretty good overview of current and future situation with RIA applications. In the article you will find his opinion over the following topics:

- Windows Presentation Foundation
- XBAP
- WPF/E
- Why Flash isnt the key

PS.
in one of the comments below somebody asks where is SVG, and why isnt it mentioned. I would like to say that SVG is way out of the picture. There are several factors that are seriously on the way to provide multiplatform solution:
- Adobe officially anounced that will stop supporting that format
- Creating SVG application isnt piece of cake and sometimes supporting these is also trouble
- There isnt native browsers support, you will need to install viewers to play SVG

Here is the link to original article by Rick

view original

Today everyone talks about Web 2.0. But while the idea of a collective intelligence, implied here by the term’s inventor Tim O’Reily remains an object of trivial speculations, it is obvious that the World Wide Web is changing. Web applications are increasingly approaching the level of functionality, which is usually found only in desktop applications. And as this trend is gaining momentum, we can already witness the dawn of a new era brought about by a novel kind of web applications - Rich Internet Applications (IRA). At the same time, the popularity of terms like Web 2.0 and RIA makes developers use them as an attractive label on their products, without actually understanding the meaning behind those notions. So what does RIA mean, eventually?