O’Reilly: Inside RIA

RJ blogged a bit earlier, but I thought I'd share a couple of my thoughts too. We all knew this would come eventually, but now is official: Flash is more open thanks to the Open Sceen Project. Although we're not going to see the impact overnight this is going to be very important for mobile, devices and large organizations in the years to come. The one catch is we don't know the exact licensing yet.

First of all, let me start off by saying that this is NOT another blog article in the great RIA platform debate. While I am an AJAX developer, and have been for several years now, the point of this article is not to take sides and convince you that AJAX is the best RIA tool available. Because AJAX isn't. Except when it is. You see, tools have uses, and to say that any one platform is in all ways superior is, I think, overstating things. A lot. Yes, I'm a bit biased, but not so much so that I feel the need to convince people that AJAX has no flaws. Flex and Silverlight have strengths that lay against weaknesses in AJAX, and vice versa. The question isn't “Which platform is best”, but “Which platform best fits my needs”.

Jean Sammet wrote Computer Languages: History and Fundamentals in 1969. It was a survey of 120 programming languages, some examined in considerable detail. Sammet's book chronicled languages that were designed before the Structured Programming Revolution and the later development of Object-Orientation. The book's cover featured a picture of the Tower of Babel. Many of the bricks in the structure of the tower bore the names of programming languages.

I just caught this very exciting bit of information regarding Flash in Google searches. Google's indexing Flash text content using Adobe's Search Engine SDK. This is according to an interview Stephen Spencer conducted with Matt Cutts from Google. I haven't found this on any official Google page, but it is more or less from the horses mouth.

Rich Tretola, the new Community Manager for InsideRIA says hello, offers his insight on the goals and future of InsideRIA introduces the team of experts of InsideRIA, and asks for your feedback to help make InsideRIA the number one place on the Internet for Rich Internet Application resources and information.

This section will be the future home for screencasts dedicated to RIA Standards. Got an idea for a topic you would like to see created as a screencasts on RIA Standards? Please contact me at rtretola@oreilly.com....

This section will be the future home for full length articles dedicated to RIA Standards. Got an idea for a topic you would like to see created as a feature article on RIA Standards? Please contact me at rtretola@oreilly.com....