The RIA battlelines

(Not to be confused with the RIAA battle - that's an entirely different funny/sad Monty Pythonesque story about how suing your customers is really in their best interests...)

Interesting article yesterday at Zdnet about the upcoming technology infrastructure contenders for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), primarily Flash/Apollo, XUL/Firefox, and XBAP/WPFe.



Not sure how much I agree with the details, but the broad strokes are interesting at least (to me at least :P - I've written on this topic more than a few times). The business models for the technology originators gets pretty short shrift though - Adobe's charging directly, through tools and the runtime (at least for devices), whilst the Mozilla Foundation's stuff is free (as in beer and as in software) with Microsoft somewhere in the middle. Wonder what impact that will have on success opportunities?

Also interesting is the implicit notion/question that the main turf war will be over browser plug-ins and/or extensions, as opposed to server-ware or development paradigms (like AJAX, Rails, etc.) - remains to be seen if that's true, though it feels right. Even Flash is still primarily ad-ware - and wherefore art though client-side Java or .NET apps?

Complicating matters further is the increasing user/input interaction fragmentation caused by portable general purpose computing devices like smart phones, PSPs and the like.

Some examples from the past.