RIA Weekly #47 – MIX09, Open Web Standards

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Ryan and I have been traveling around frequently these past two weeks: SXSW, MIX09, and EclipseCon. While I was traveling back to Austin from EclipseCon, we finally pinned down to record a recap. It’s heavy on the Silverlight and MIX09 coverage, but there’s plenty of other RIA news as well.

• First of, as always, David Tucker over at InsideRIA does a good job rounding up the RIA news. For Silverlight, it’s hard to beat Dave Campbell’s Silverlight Cream link-ups over at WynApse.
• While we missed talking about it, check out some of our SXSW commentary and info: see Profiles in Courage interview with Mando Escamilla for a discussion of desktop RIA/Ajax and check out the two RIA Weekly specials from SXSW: JavaFX with Josh & Ryan with Augmented Reality.
• Silverlight 3.0 – (Tim Heuer’s overview is great) deep linking, graphics improvements, more expansion of APIs and UI controls/widgets. Media: H.264 and AAC (moving out of an encoding ghetto mentality)
• .Net RIA Services – uses LINQ to connect stuff up together. A middle-man for access between the front-end and back-end (or “data-tier”).
• SketchFlow in Expression Blend – “SketchFlow is a fun, informal, flexible, quick and powerful way to sketch and prototype rich, dynamic interactivity with Expression Blend.” – Christian Schormann. See Christian’s Blend 3 write-up and also another quick take on Blend 3 updates.
• Sorting out the Expression brand: what is Blend vs. Expression vs. Expression Blend? …vs. Expression Design.
• Soyatec Silverlight on the Mac, Eclipse4SL.
• Out of browser support – Ryan answers the big question, how is this different than AIR.
• $25,000 JavaFX Coding Challenge. Develop an app with JavaFX 1.1 and NetBeans 6.5.
• Web standards wrangling – Ryan, then Dion.
• Ryan points out Tim Sneath’s post on Windows Azure as a good source for understanding how Azure fits into the RIA world. This gets us to discussing the role cloud computing might play as the back-end for RIAs.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Microsoft, Adobe, and Sun are clients, as is Eclipse. Adobe sponsors this podcast.