How do you select three mainstream RIA technologies?

A few days ago, I heard that Adobe released the rtmp (Real-Time Message Protocol) for flash player, "here ". At first glance, it seems like a good stuff. It has the following advantages: support for high-performance data push (mainly audio and video) to flash player; support for over HTTP and HTTPS. I think that in the past two to two years, Microsoft has also made frequent attacks on Silverlight. Sun is also unwilling to be lonely, and made a javafx (just released two months ago, For details, see "here "). It seems that there is a fierce competition in the RIA field. Let's just gossip about these three technologies today.
Some may ask, why don't I mention Ajax? The main reason is that AJAX is very different from those three things. They do not belong to the same dimension and are not comparable (Ajax is never devalued ). So let's leave it aside today (if you have time to talk about Ajax next time ).

★Flash/flex
　
Flash/flex was previously developed by Macromedia. Adobe has a unique eye and swallowed up Macromedia in. Flash/flex
Has become a magic weapon for Adobe. In fact, the original purchase of Macromedia is not very high, that is, 3.4 billion US dollars. This number is a small concept for Microsoft. Unfortunately, Microsoft was so blind at the beginning that it did not come first. Otherwise, the structure of the RIA market is another scene. After Adobe bought Macromedia, it paid a lot of money for flash, and there were no direct competitors in those years. So in 70%, Flash/flex had become a de facto standard in the RIA market, with of PC shares at that time. And started to enter the mobile phone market.
Currently, Flash/flex has a large user base and cross-platform (including operating systems, browsers, and mobile devices ).
　
However, I have been using flash/flex for 2-3 years. One major problem is that the language compatibility is not good enough. When we migrated from actionscript2 to actionscript3, people in the team complained (a lot of code was almost rewritten ). Another problem is that features are not strong enough to make people feel uncomfortable. For example, we have not yet been able to support multithreading well (only asynchronous callback is supported); for example, we cannot integrate PDF well (it should be difficult to integrate because it is a product of our own company ).

★Silverlight
　
It is estimated that after 06 years, Microsoft found that the trend was wrong, and quickly made great efforts to do it on its own. Silverlight was released at the end of 07 and 08 respectively.
1.0 and silverlight2.0 (3.0 is expected to be launched in ). Then, at the business level, they successively shot the game: first, they cooperated with NBC (National Broadcasting Corporation) during the 08 Olympics to broadcast events using Silverlight; then they used Silverlight at last month's US president's inauguration ceremony. Microsoft's intention is very obvious, that is, to take advantage of various opportunities in the market to compete for user shares, to make up for the disadvantage of flash. In addition, it constantly strengthens its technical capabilities and tries to open up flex to attract developers.
To talk about the advantages of Silverlight, I think relying on DOTNET is the main advantage. With DOTNET, Silverlight can integrate some existing languages (it is said that JScript, ironpython, ironruby, and VB are supported) and libraries; it can also help original dotnetprogrammers to get started. Silverlight is more powerful than flex in terms of functionality (such as multithreading and 3d ).
However, relying on DOTNET also leads to the main disadvantage of Silverlight: cross-platform is not good enough. Despite the help of moonlight, it is still not ideal (especially for Linux ).

★By the way, javafx
To be honest, javafx is really poor. One of Sun's major mistakes lies in the fact that follow-up is too slow. Microsoft started slowly, and sun was slower than it. Sun's financial resources are much worse than Microsoft's (Sun's current self-protection is hard to protect, and there is no way to burn money for promotion like Microsoft's). It is better to be an IDE than Microsoft's. It's really time, location, and people. It's no wonder that even the Java Community is not enthusiastic about it (there is an article by Bruce Eckel, "Does anyone really care about desktop java ?" ).

★Conclusion
If you want to develop a web system, you plan to select one of the above three RIA technologies. Then, evaluate the cross-platform requirements of your web applications? If you need to support a variety of client operating systems and browsers at the same time, I suggest you choose Flex (my department is facing this situation now); otherwise, if you decideAs longIf Windows is supported, we recommend that you select Silverlight. For javafx, do not consider it in the short term.

Http://program-think.blogspot.com/2009/02/ria-review-flash-silverlight-javafx.html