RIA (Rich Internet Application) wants to be free
Today Microsoft announced the official launch of Silverlight (via techcrunch), which can be used to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA). And if you remember Sun gave an answer to Microsoft’s Silverlight, that’s JavaFX, in the Java One conference last May (link here). Adobe also came up with its own RIA platform called Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly code-named Apollo. I believe all these products are boon for the developers but not for RIA. Sun, Microsoft and Macromedia are guilty of the same thing trying to tie RIA to their own platform. What they are missing is that RIA wants to be free.
We should not tie RIA to any platform. All we need to do is specify what the client should do and let the execution / interpretation of that be unspecified. This is what HTML is about. It specified what the client (the browser) should do, and focused on marking up content. All we need to do is to apply the same concept in RIA and build something like a RIA markup language. If that’s the case we could build runtimes in Java, .NET, C++ or in whatever language you want. This is what OpenLaszlo did. The specification itself is technology agnostic and they focused on Java/Flash as the runtime. Similarly, Mozilla’s XUL could be interpreted by engines written in any language.
So all I’m saying is do not tie RIA to a specific platform. I would be glad to see a RIA Consortium that focuses on building something like a RIA markup language.