The week on the Weekly RIA Round-Up we bring a new competitor to the RIA lineup with JavaFX, Silverlight counts down the days until its big show, Adobe lends Zend a helping hand, a collection of Silverlight tutorials are released, and OpenLaszlo connects with Netbeans.

Featured: JavaFX Preview SDK

The JavaFX Preview SDK launched this week, and you may have already read several items about it here on InsideRIA. This Preview SDK brings us one step closer to the 1.0 release that will come later this year, and it also is the first chance for most developers to actually write their first JavaFX application.

JavaFX Blog: Announcing the JavaFX Preview SDK

InsideRIA: What is the JavaFX Preview SDK

Resources

If you would like to get more information about JavaFX, you can check out the following links which will provide downloads, tutorials, and documentation.

JavaFX Site
Preview SDK Download
JavaFX Reference
JavaFX Blog
JavaFX Screencasts
Beginner Tutorial Series

Getting Started

If you are interested in creating your first JavaFX application, several bloggers have detailed their experiences:

JavaFX Blog: Start Your Engines

InsideRIA: Hands On With JavaFX - First Impressions

MrinalWadhwa.com: JavaFx preview released, here’s my HelloWorld app and some initial thoughts

DieAjax.com: 10 Minute Tutorial - JavaFX: Hello World

Adobe is Helping Zend add AMF Support to the Zend Framework

Andi Gutman of Zend broke the news that Adobe will be contributing support to add full AMF capability to the Zend Framework. This could be great news for Flash / Flex developers who are interested in using PHP as a backend for their RIA. While AMF support has been available in AMFPHP, it will now be baked into the popular Zend Framework. Wade Arnold (of AMFPHP) will be leading the integration process for Adobe.

Andi Gutmans: Adobe to contribute AMF support to Zend Framework

Flex Team Blog: Adobe Contributing AMF Support to Zend Framework

Silverlight Tutorials

Joe Stagner recently highlighted the 44 Silverlight tutorial videos by Mike Taulty on MSDN. These tutorial videos cover everything from a simple Hello World application to creating multi-threaded Silverlight applications.

MisfitGeek.com: 44 Silverlight Videos

OpenLaszlo and Netbeans

The Netbeans plugin was included with the OpenLaszlo 4.1.1 update a few weeks ago, and Netbeans.tv now has a tutorial for using this plug-in with the IDE to develop applications.

Netbeans.tv: Getting started with OpenLaszlo and NetBeans IDE

Silverlight's Olympic Countdown

We are less than a week away from the beginning of the 2008 Olympics. If you haven't heard, Microsoft will be using Silverlight to push hundreds of hours of Olympics coverage through the web on the nbcolympics.com site. This will be one of the first real tests for Silverlight, and Microsoft is hoping that this also helps increase Silverlight's install base. We will certainly be watching user reaction this week to see how it all works out.

MSDN: See the Olympic games as never before

Read more from David Tucker.