RIA Weekly #28 – Mozilla Open Web, Microsoft PDC, Spying on Flex 4, Android

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This week, Ryan and I lucky to be joined by Mozilla’s Dion Almaer. As such, we start out talking about his recent move to Mozilla to work on open web developer tools.

I ask Dion to tell us what he means by “open web,” which gets us into a fun way of defining that term: not so much technologically bound, but more in the ease of use for such technologies by developers. This mind-set is more expansive than “web development” and you can start to imagine that open, non-traditional web-UI layers like RIA technologies could be cajoled into this pool.

Dion then tells us his impressions of Microsoft’s PDC conference this week, which he was lucky enough to attend. As usual, conversations around Microsoft revolve around Microsoft’s challenge of expanding beyond their current base; we discuss the great appeal of the “the blue pill.”

We then talk about one of Ryan’s recent “finds,” that (of course, being open source) Flex 4 source code changes are available to the public. Thus, you can watch the development of Flex 4, teasing out new features and fixes.

From there, we have a slight diversion into Java threaded programming, and then discuss the release of the G1/Android phone of which both Ryan and Dion have had the chance to play around with.

Some items we didn’t cover, but are worth checking on are: Netflix using Silverlight for it’s on-demand video and the popular RIA application SlideRocket opening up to the public.

Sponsorship

This Episode is Sponsored by Adobe:

Use the Adobe Flex framework and Adobe AIR to create rich Internet applications. RIAs that combine the wide reach of the browser and the flexibility of applications that can also be delivered outside the browser. Adobe Flex combined with Adobe AIR provides an agile and powerful solution to develop and make quick iterations on applications that reach across platforms and deliver a consistent user experience.

Download the free Flex Builder trial and the Adobe AIR SDK and start building the next- generation of RIAs.

Disclosure: Microsoft and Adobe are clients, as is Sun. Adobe sponsored this episode, as noted above.