What to choose for developing a Rich Internet Application?

Lately I became very interested in the different choices for developing Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Although I followed the different announces of the various technologies I didn't put much effort in having a big picture of the different approaches. As I am now looking for some stable development libraries and frameworks for rich user interfaces I put together a short overview of the various options.

• AJAX
  AJAX is well known due to the web 2.0 bubble. It's the advancement of DHTML with XML-RPC capabilities. Prototype and the Yahoo User Interface (YUI) are two well known AJAX frameworks, that help rapid user interface development.
• OpenLaszlo
  http://www.openlaszlo.org/
  OpenLaszlo is an open source platform for rich user interface clients. OpenLaszlo Applications are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML. The OpenLaszlo APIs provide animation, layout, data binding, server communication, and declarative UI. An OpenLaszlo application can be as short as a single source file, or factored into multiple files that define reusable classes and libraries.
• Adobe FLEX
  http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
  Flex is a free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. While the SDK is available for free Adobe offers the Flex Builder to accelerate the development time for Flex applications. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript 3, a powerful OO programming language is used to create client logic. These are compiled into flash files in combination with Javascript.
• Microsoft Silverlight
  http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/
  Silverlight is a direct competitor to Flex and Flash. You need to install the silverlight plugin in order to start the silverlight application. That's a major drawback of silverlight as Flash is widely distributed already.
• Sun JavaFX
  http://www.sun.com/software/javafx/
  JavaFX has two major components, Script and Mobile. More components will be developed in future by Sun. The core of JavaFX is JavaFX Script, which is a declarative scripting language. It is very different from Java code, but has a high degree of interactivity with Java classes. Many classes of the JavaFX Script are designed for implementing Swing and Java 2D functionalities more easily. With JavaFX Script you can develop GUIs, animations, and cool effects for text and graphics using only a few straightforward lines of code. And, as a plus, you can wrap Java and HTML code into JavaFX Script.
TechCrunch: AIR vs. Silverlight
YUI and AIR

 

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