This week, Adobe and Zend extend their partnership, Gears is released for Safari, Adobe AIR for Linux is upgraded to Beta, and Jesse Liberty creates a Silverlight application in 20 minutes. All this and more on the Weekly RIA Roundup from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: Adobe Extends Zend Partnership

This week at the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo, Adobe announced a formal partnership with Zend to further integrate Flex and PHP. As we previously discussed, Adobe was working to bring AMF support to the Zend Framework, but now Adobe has extended their support for Zend. Adobe will now also work to properly integrate the developer toolsets, so that Zend Studio and Flex Builder can be used together to create PHP-based Flex applications.The Zend Press Release highlights this integration:

In addition, Zend and Adobe plan to optimize the experience for developers using their respective development environments. Zend Studio and Adobe® Flex® Builder™, both built on the open source Eclipse platform, provide robust coding, debugging, and testing tools for professional developers. Today, the two environments enable greater productivity, simplified deployment and end-to-end debugging of applications. Moving forward, Zend and Adobe plan to identify and implement cross-product integration points that optimize developer workflow and reduce development time. - Zend Technologies

If you are interested in learning more about this integration, you should certainly check out the podcast with Mike Potter of Adobe listed below.

Links

Flex Team Blog (Adobe): Adobe and Zend Announce Collaboration

RIA Weekly Podcast: RIA Weekly 21 - Adobe’s Mike Potter on the Zend/Adobe Partnership and Curling

Adobe Developer Center: Flex and PHP

World Wide Web Foundation Created

Following on the heels of the recently announced Open Web Foundation, Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) announced the creation of the World Wide Web foundation. Here is the stated purpose of the WWW Foundation:

The World Wide Web Foundation seeks to advance One Web that is free and open, to expand the Web's capability and robustness, and to extend the Web's benefits to all people on the planet. - World Wide Web Foundation

Only time will tell if these foundations will have any effect on the RIA landscape in the upcoming years, but they seem to have the interest of many investors.

Links

Ajaxian: World Wide Web Foundation Announced

World Wide Web Foundation

Gears Extends to Safari

This week, Google released Gears for Safari. This means that you can now take advantage of all of the gears enabled sites (Google Docs, Zoho, etc...) on Mac OSX in Safari. This also means that developers can now create Gears-enabled sites for all of the big three browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari).

Links

Google Gears Blog: Gears for Safari

Linux Version of AIR Reaches Beta

Adobe released the next iteration of the AIR 1.1 runtime for Linux (which is now in Beta). This bring many features to AIR that were previously unavailable in the alpha release for Linux.

Links

Mike Chambers (Adobe): Adobe AIR for Linux Beta is live

Adobe Labs: Adobe AIR for Linux

Creating a Simple Silverlight Application

Jesse Liberty from Microsoft took some time to walk users through the Silverlight application creation process with Blend and Visual Studio. In this tutorial, he creates a simple timer application in 20 minutes, and explains each step along the way. Sample code is included.

Links

Jesse Liberty (Microsoft): Throwing Together an Application

JavaFX and the Future of Java for RIA's

In this podcast, Simon Ritter from Sun explains a bit about JavaFX and where it is going. Also, there is a link to a new JavaFX application, Music Pinboard, which illustrates what a complete JavaFX application can be (although this current version of the application appears to be Windows only).

Links

DZone: Podcast: The Future Of Java For Rich Internet Applications

Keep Up To Date with Chrome

For developers who want to stay current with all of the Chrome updates and fixes (even before formal versions are released), Google has provided the Google Chrome Channel Chooser. This will allow you to use the current Dev channel release instead of the current formal release.

Links

Lifehacker: Keep up With the Cutting Edge Releases of Chrome

Chromium.org: Early Access to Features and Fixes

Read more from David Tucker.