By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

We're told that the future of applications relies on app servers and rich, graphical clients. But will market share or common sense determine which method of building RIAs that developers choose most?

All the major rich Internet applications platforms that are in active use today are leveraged upon some existing, already well-deployed component. Adobe's AIR relies on the ubiquity of Flash video and the underlying language constructs that have supported Flash in the past, such as Flex. Microsoft's Silverlight is a vehicle for extending a part of the .NET Framework and Common Language Runtime -- and thus with them, a little bit more of Windows -- into everyone's computing environment; and once Microsoft secures that open pipeline, it may be able to push C# and other technologies through it.

Up to now, Google has been the one with the RIA platform that has tried to leverage Java, along with JavaScript (which is related in style but not in architecture, and which is essentially a product of Mozilla). Google Web Toolkit uses Java tools as a staging ground for Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX) applications. Mozilla has been testing the waters for some time with its own RIA platform experiment called XULRunner; and Curl has had the wherewithal to go it alone, with both a development environment and a runtime that rely on no single pre-existing platform. (Some dispute whether AJAX truly qualifies as RIA, but I tend to say that if an application can run outside the browser with full graphical resplendence, as though it had been installed on the user's computer directly, then it's an RIA.)

To this mix of players, enter Sun Microsystems. Its JavaFX platform formally exited beta on Monday, and its objective is to further extend the Java 6 runtime platform onto more systems. Rich graphical applications built with JavaFX, like other Java apps since the 1990s, can run outside of the Web browser though maintain their links to servers through HTTP.

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