Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Silverlight, Flex/Apollo, F3/JavaFX, straight Ajax or GWT, etc - there are a ton of RIA choices. I agree with the sentiment sometimes that keeping up is tough, but I also would not go so far as to say choices are bad. Choices just reflect how important/difficult a task is, and how different people have elected to deal with it.

Now that said, I also often think to myself "what the hell is [scripting lang X] for", I can do all this stuff already with Java (or insert C#, etc). For me personally I don't use Groovy, Ruby, Python, and so on - because a lot of what they offer is convenience rather than new functionality, and I have other ways, within Java, of dealing with the supposed issues they address. Don't get me wrong, these things have a place - and if you are unfamiliar with Java they can arguably be a better starting point, but if I am sitting down to write a new "thing", even a command line background script/process, it's Java.

In the long run though, as I once heard Gosling say, "I intensely don't care about about the syntax." I just use Java because it's more familiar to me, and does not LACK any of the capabilities of the other guys (in fact I would argue the inverse - I like static typing, etc). More important are the patterns used to develop solutions, and of course the bytecode. The bytecode matters because of what platforms are supported.

Microsoft and Sun are both trying to improve and make more seamless the whole "write once, run . . ." concept. We all should be able to write stuff and have it run on the web, on the desktop, on a mobile device, etc - from the same code base (and easily handle on/offline). (And I think JavaFX is a good step in that direction, but I just still don't believe in applets.) Hopefully Silverlight, and JavaFX, will ultimately improve the landscape and also leverage what we already know - at least I think that is part of the intention.