Cast your mind back to the year 2000. Microsoft has just announced its .NET Framework, complete with a new language called C# - that was in July, at the Orlando Professional Developers Conference.

Using JSF and Flex components together while binding Flex components to standard JSF managed beans. Fiji also offers out-of-the-box JSF-Flash charting components.

JavaFX SDK 1.0 will be released tomorrow, December 4th, 2008, so while we're waiting I thought you might want to learn more about the history of JavaFX and the "contrarian mind" behind it. Al Riske wrote an excellent piece in Sun's "Contrarian Minds" series in which he interviewed Chris Oliver, delving into Chris' background and his role in founding JavaFX. By the way, Chris is the guy on the left in the picture above, presenting JavaFX with Dr. Gosling :-)

There’s nothing like the right link at the right time. Remy Rakic (Twitter alias lqd) has left a link to the apparent release jars of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 in the comments on the previous entry. So i’ve decided to see whether there is anything new in the JMC department since the last time i’ve looked at it.

For those anticipating the imminent JavaFX 1.0 launch, a few more relevant details emerged during yesterday’s AYDJ podcast:

Want to get up to speed quickly on the JavaFX Script language? Weiqi Gao of Object Computing, Inc. (OCI) has written an excellent article that covers the concepts and language elements of JavaFX Script in a fast-paced but approachable manner. If you've followed this blog or read the first Apress JavaFX Script book, you'll recognize Weiqi as a leader in the JavaFX Script community as well as the Technical Reviewer of the book.

A case study about why and how to build rich web applications efficiently.

Article describing why ColdFusion is a good fit for rich internet applications.

Task, Time and Project Management Software was always an important prerequisite for successful projects and not only in the software industry. Recently a lot of software was written using AJAX (guilty :-) making collaboration a lot easier. I have created a Google Table comparing 42 of them: Task, Time and Project Management Software http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pNzDN2mIRqnb81JK1LRxdFA

Great examples of the new 3D features in Flash Player 10. This really raises the bar for real time 3D for the masses.

A guy offers some reasons people might not want to use Flex and compares it with some functionality from Tapestry. I am not associated with Flex or Tapestry.

Yes, that's a bold statement, but I've waited 13 years to be able to say it. If you've followed this blog or have heard me speak about JavaFX, you know that I was disappointed with the browser wars in the late 90s that fragmented and slowed down the ubiquity of the Java Virtual Machine. Instead of writing rich-client Java applications, the last 13 years of software development has largely consisted of trying to make browsers do what they were never designed to do. If I may speak plainly, the result has been applications that consist of a big mess of varying flavors of JavaScript, HTML, etc. that leave developers overwhelmed and users underwhelmed.

I had a chance to reflect a little bit today on Silverlight and Flash and I’d like to offer these observations.

There aren't many robust business applications powered by Adobe's new rich Internet application platform yet, but we found a few gems you can download right now

Data binding simplifies how you sync a data object's properties with their visual representations, and Beans Binding for Java (JSR 295) aims to deliver a default data-binding specification for the Java platform. Find out how to use Beans Binding and work around its onerous overhead.

Chet Haase of Adobe Systems, who previously worked at Sun on the JavaFX team, shared the following comparisons of JavaFX and Adobe Flex on the Yahoo FlexCoder group.

Flash Catalyst is what everyone formerly knew as Thermo and Flex Builder 4 is the "Gumbo" release. Traditionally, Adobe always invested in developer productivity tools for Flex but they are now spreading out to design-oriented tools with Flash Catalyst, Flash Pro CS4 ad FXG.

Adobe MAX this year had over 5,000 attendees. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke first. He focuses on what Adobe is calling the Flash Platform which now includes Thermo and Flex Builder. Thermo has now been branded as Flash Catalyst, which a preview build available to all MAX attendees.

Adobe released version 1.5 of Adobe AIR today, incorporating Flash Player 10 (Pixel Bender, hardware accelerated graphics, improved video streaming, 3D effects) and the super fast JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish.

Pivot is a platform for building rich internet applications that run in the Java Plugin. While Pivot applications are often built using a combination of XML and Java, it is sometimes more convenient to build simple applications or applications whose code is likely to change often, such as prototypes, using a scripting language such as JavaScript. Pivot now allows developers to write their application logic using their scripting language of choice, using the features provided by the javax.script package available in Java 6 and above.

Article on using WebSockets, and Server Sent Events proposed in HTML 5 specifications to build real time apps

One of most curious things of JavaFX is the possibility of multiple inheritance, a feature not present on it's "parent language" Java.

Today, FlexServerLib, the BlazeDS extension library was announced. The goal of FlexServerLib is to provide off-the-shelf access to services Flex developers would not normally be used to coding, like email, pdf generation, etc.

X2O makes building database-driven Flex and Flash CS4 apps incredibly faster. Define your data model using the visual interface and it will generate a database, a secure CMS, web services, and a library that you can drop into your project and use to interact with your data model via an easy to use API. No hosting setup, database development or server-side programming...instead, it lets you focus on your application.

Given the number of frameworks now available for rich Internet application (RIA), choosing the right one, if not the best one, can be a difficult decision. Inside RIA recently completed an online survey that asked Flex/ActionScript RIA developers about their preferred frameworks.