This week saw some light at the end of the tunnel for JavaFX developers, more information about Silverlight moving outside of the browser, a glimpse into the future of SproutCore, some great AIR applications, and Flash Lite moving toward a billion devices. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

FEATURED: JavaFX to Ship December 2

Quite a bit of time has passed since Sun first announced plans for JavaFX. In addition, developers have had a chance to work with the preview SDK for several months. It seems that we are now very close to the first production release, version 1.0. Simon Brocklehurst received confirmation this week that the release will happen on December 2nd. As Simon stated, this is a bit later than the 'Fall 2008' date that was initially given, but JavaFX developers are just going to be excited to be out of beta.

Simon Brocklehurst: Official - JavaFX To Be Released Dec 2

Silverlight to Compete with AIR

Microsoft released a lot of information at PDC on the future of many different platforms and tools. One of the announcements was that Silverlight would soon be moving out of the browser and into the world of occasionally-connected applications. Bill Reiss stated:

The most interesting announcement to me was that you will be able to write mesh enabled web applications that run “outside the browser” and can run in an offline mode. These can be written in Silverlight or in other web technologies. You can think of this as similar to Adobe’s AIR platform.

This will bring one of the first true competitors to AIR with a strong developer following.

Bill Reiss: Offline Apps in Silverlight?

The Future of SproutCore

This week Ajaxian covered the future of SproutCore, the Ajax framework most famous for powering Apple's MobileMe online applications. The post featured comments from Charles Jolley about the direction SproutCore will be taking for future versions. Some of the features listed were faster bindings, DOM library independence, and a new model layer.

Ajaxian: SproutCore: From MobileMe to 1.0

AIR Gaining Prominence and Usefulness

We mentioned previously that the number of AIR installs is climbing rapidly. However, the number of applications that are powered by AIR is growing rapidly as well. Career Overview posted a list of the top 100 AIR applications that assist with productivity. This list includes community favorites like Klok, Agile Tracker, and the Nasdaq Market Replay.

Career Overview: Hack Your Work Day: 100 Awesome Adobe AIR Apps for Productivity

JavaFX Game Example

Silveria Neto posted a complete JavaFX game example on his blog. This post covers the development process and also gives the source code for the roughly 300 line JavaFX application. This is one of the more succinct and direct JavaFX gaming examples that I have seen.

Silveria Neto: JavaFX, Defuse the Bomb

Flex 4 Becoming Clearer

We are less than a week away from Adobe's annual Max conference. Flex 4 will certainly be one of the many topics discussed at the event. However, for those following Flex 4, many of the updated details can be seen at the Opensource Adobe site. This site allows the community to keep up with commits to the Flex 4 SDK and also view the specifications for different aspects of Flex 4. Some of these specifications (like the Skinning specification) have recently been updated.

Adobe Opensource: Flex SDK (Gumbo)

Flash Light Penetration Forecast

Mark Doherty posted information on a study that was conducted to predict how many devices will have Flash Lite installed over the next year. Mark stated:

You can see in the above image that they are forecasting over 922 million devices to have shipped with Flash by the end of the year. In 2009 we will cross the 1 Billion device mark and should ship up to 1.5 Billion by the end of the year. What this shows is that in fact there will be 1 Billion devices in the install base toward the end of next year!

While it is still unclear what role Flash Lite will play in the RIA landscape, these numbers are certainly promising for any developer that is building Flash Lite applications.

FlashMobileBlog (Adobe): Flash Lite Penetration Forecast for 2008/2009

Read more from David Tucker.