Flashback '07: "RIA Shoot-Out" on SYS-CON.TV

I was searching for something else and came across this interesting round-table discussion on the state of RIA development, circa September 2007. The host, SYS-CON, selected a good range of experts who made many interesting points vis-à-vis RIA development.

To put the discussion in context: this was shortly after the announcement of JavaFX at JavaOne, shortly before Flex went open source and before the production release of the Silverlight SDK. AJAX was still considered a pretty exotic bird and therefore dominates a good part of the early discussion.

Topics of discussion include (in no particular order):

• Open source in the RIA marketplace (dual licensing?)
  
• A good amount of discussion on AJAX
• The Silverlight Alpha SDK releases of the time (1.0 and 1.1)
• The (then recent) release of JavaFX... to mixed reviews
• Do Silverlight and JavaFX have a shot at dethroning Flash/Flex? (Jury still out... presumed lost.)
  
• That old whipping boy: search engine optimization with RIAs ("But can Google index your RIA?")
  
• Security in RIAs

In one interesting segment, the always (refreshingly) opinionated Yakov Fain makes some good points about choosing an enterprise RIA technology. Specifically, he makes the case for Java (server) + Flex (client) citing the fact that you often inherit whatever OS infrastructure your client already has in place, so you would do well to use cross-platform technologies. All the same, he adds that it would be a disservice to your clients to fall in love with a particular technology. He therefore leaves the door open to the possibility of JavaFX overtaking Flex on the client. All the same, he discounts .NET on the server side, since it doesn't play nice outside of the Windows platform.

It's amazing how fast things change in the development world. It's equally amazing how we are still discussing/disagreeing on many of the same issues nearly two years later. Anyways, I personally enjoyed listening to the discussion... perhaps you will, too.

Check it out here.