With all my talk about Flex and AIR the other day, I’m surprised no one pinged me — hard — about other RIA options. Like OpenLaszlo, Silverlight, or even JavaFX.

Admittedly, I am curious about OpenLaszlo, especially since they started compiling both to Ajax and Flash. But I’ve never given them a fair shake. I’m not sure why, except a sneaking suspicion that they wouldn’t be around for long. That hasn’t proven to be the case thus, although we haven’t yet seen the shake-out from the open-sourcing of the Flex SDK yet. But again, that could just be me being unfair.

I’m waiting to see what happens with JavaFX. The client-side Java experience has been improving in recent years, and I expect JavaFX to help quite a bit. Once I sort out just what the hell it is. :) There’s a lot that fits under the JavaFX umbrella. I think the consumer JRE will quietly make people’s Java experience better, and I do have high hopes for JavaFX Script making client GUI development easier. But they’re nervous high hopes, like it won’t take long for the bottom to fall out.

cover of Silverlight bookSilverlight… Again, haven’t given a fair shake because I don’t develop in a Microsoft environment. The runtime may eventually become ubiquitous on Windows, but … well, I’ll just wait this one out and see. It’s like Mono: I’d like to look closer at it but just plain don’t have the time and am not motivated to make the time right now.

That said, I have every intention of reading a new e-book on Silverlight 1.1. O’Reilly’s “short cut” on LINQ was a great introduction, giving me a good feel for what can be done with LINQ. I hope the Silverlight book do be the same.