Evans Data Knows Developers - RIA Trends (
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What trends are you seeing in the rich Internet applications [RIA]
arena?
No. 1, Flash is the incumbent, the leader. But if you look at Flex, [Adobe] AIR,
[Microsoft] Silverlight and Eclipse RCP [Rich Client Platform], all of them
have smaller market share. But if you look at the next 12 to 18 months, they
just about double their current market share. And interesting enough,
Silverlight almost triples. Silverlight is very, very popular with this Web 2.0
technology developer.
What do you attribute that to? General curiosity? Microsoft marketing?
I think Microsoft marketing and the fact that Microsoft supports its
products very well. And many people think about Microsoft as not the
innovator—which they aren't in many cases—but, boy, they're the fastest
follower you can find. When you look at developer support and quality of
product, and then you look at how those products tie back into the stack so
easily, it really facilitates the productivity of these developers. So that's
that.
An RIA war is brewing. Read more here.
From our standpoint, Adobe and Microsoft from the RIA side are the leaders
and will be the leaders. IBM likes to think
that Eclipse, and the Rich Client Platform, is going to be, but it's not. It
hasn't grabbed the market share that they thought it would.
Do you think the Linux support will boost that?
You know, I think from the RIA standpoint, the OS is really transparent if
you do it right. I think it's OS-agnostic.
But you just have to do it, though, because Silverlight has Moonlight
as its Linux implementation, and then Adobe has introduced a beta of a Linux
version of AIR.
Exactly, so the OS becomes a non-issue, and it really gets down to the
performance of the RIA. And Silverlight's very good, and it's being adopted
rapidly.
Application Development 
