Last week I delivered a week long training on Adobe Flex 3 (yet again). Apart from the technologies – Adobe Flex and ActionScript – the training aimed to focus on Web 2.0 and RIA.

Web 2.0 and RIA, today, are more or less established philosophies.

However, what I think is that the world is heavily divided on which framework / toolkit to go for. Most of the web revolves around JavaScript & Ajax and/or Flash & ActionScript. Slowly and gradually, Silverlight & WPF/JavaScript seems to be making inroad on the development front – not quite sure how fast.

So, I thought let me try to compile a few frameworks (partial list inspired from the one at Wikipedia):

• Dojo Toolkit available at http://dojotoolkit.org. It is supported by IBM, Sun, AOL, BEA and SitePen among others.
• Google Web Toolkit available at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit. It is supported and developed by Google.
• ExtJs available at http://extjs.com. Infact, the team married GWT and created GWT-Ext available at http://gwt-ext.com.
• Yahoo! UI available at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui. It is supported by Yahoo!
• jQuery available at http://www.jquery.com.
• Adobe Flex at http://www.adobe.com/products/flex.
• Microsoft Silverlight available at http://www.silverlight.net.

Barring Adobe Flex, all other frameworks use a common technology – JavaScript and Ajax.

However, some toolkits like Dojo uses / used Flash for offline storage. Some of them are moving to Google Gears for offline store.

And at the moment, I have to rush to the market… will build on this in my subsequent articles.