RIA arguments

I don't like to work in RIAs. Why reinvent the web when we have AJAX?

That said, I have a bit of respect for what Adobe has done with Flex and little respect for OpenLazlo, Silverlight, or JavaFx.

Anyway, someone I know is a huge OpenLazlo fan. I think they are mistaken to be entranced by OpenLazlo. Flex does all that OpenLazlo does, does it better, and does it for the same cost (free). Furthermore, the chart here shows just what the job market is for OpenLazlo, Flex, and other RIAs:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rohant/archive/2007/11/19/so-how-safe-is-your-bet-on-silverlight-wpf-and-net-3-0.aspx

The Dark Side begins its seduction...

...but I don't think many will convert.

I'm talking about the Python community embracing the Microsoft Silverlight Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). This lets us write Iron Python for the browser, in the same way that Action Script is used in Flash, or Java in Applets.

It just seems odd. Plus, Iron Python, for all its virtues, has to do some Microsoftisms in order to work. This means that unlike moving my code wrote using cpython on Windows to Mac OS X to FreeBSD to UNIX to Linux, I have to worry about when I move from cpython to Iron Python. So this means we will have a big code set (Iron Python) in DLR that won't work anywhere else.

Bleah.

Here is to hoping that Silverlight does not take off well.