As with every development project, there's a decision to be made what technology you're going to use to build it and with Yooba Studio things were no different. Since we were building a RIA, the options narrowed down a bit. Having years of experience developing with Flash, the choice for us was Adobe Flex.

That was quite some time ago. Since then other technologies have shown up, and I'm guessing making the decision today can be quite hard for a lot of developers. Inside RIA recently compared the three big ones: Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun JavaFX.

Silverlight has the advantage of a very mature developing platform (Visual Studio) and a huge developer community. Sun is offering an interesting thing with JavaFX, building on well known technology and with the recent announcement of it being used in the Blu-Ray specification making it even more interesting. One thing that speaks for Flex is the fact that applications made with it can be used by alot of people, without them having to download and install another plugin. Also, the recent release of Flex Builder 3 presents developers with a great tool for design as well as coding.

The choice we made of Adobe Flex as 'our' RIA technology still stands today, but it's going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft and Suns RIA offerings can bring in the future.

Tags: adobe, flex, microsoft, silverlight, sun, javafx