I’m evaluating Silverlight for a RIA right now. A large amount of the Gui is to be designed by people without programming skills. Visually the application should be very appealing, animations, smooth transitions and so on are a big plus for us. Blend and Silverlight seem to be tailored very well to fit this requirement. However it does need the runtime which is somewhat acceptable for us but also a little disadvantage.
So, do you know an mature Ria-like alternatives (similar ease of development, all-in-one-happy-package without runtime) outside of this ecosystem? I had a look at Qt and the designer but I’m not sure what to make of it in the moment with all the buzz about it and if it is fitting to our needs.
Are there other alternatives you can recommend?
Thanks in advance.
If you’re familiar with .NET technologies and looking at Silverlight from that perspective, its may be the way to go in that you will be using the same tools. Silverlight is also cross-platform on desktops.
Adobe Air as far as I can tell can be many things, one or more combininations of flash, flex, javascript, html. This is also cross platform in terms of desktop machines.
Html/jQuery/Javascript is another option, this also enables usage on mobile devices.
There are 3rd party plugins/add-ons and components for most of these technologies that help with both features and the visual aspect of the interface.