I am led to believe that AIR is one of the best client side, server platforms around? It allows you to write a web app which works like a desktop app? I know how to program in ASP.net C#, and PHP but prefer ASP.net because of Visual Studio making it so easy. Does AIR, JAVA, etc... have IDE's that make progamming easier and quicker. Also am I the only one that finds javascript a pain in the ass to script, but is a necessary evil for providing client side functionality. Does AIR, JAVA, etc... overcome this pain?
There is Netbeans IDE which is as powerful as Visual Studio. You can use netbeans not only with Java-which is the primary language. You can use it with HTML, CSS, XML, C++, C and now PHP. Check it out
Netbeans and java are both Open source, No money payment and there are 1000s of plugins on netbeans site free to download.
if this is what you are talking about. "IntelliSense is Microsoft's implementation of autocompletion"..then netbeans have a very solid auto completion feature. its so good. I use it 24/7 as its my IDE both at work and ant home. Its very comprehensive code completion for all libraries in classpath, html, xml, java, javascript, php and even css. for that I will bet my life on it...lol
And Java can be developed from just about any platform, as well as to any platform. (where as silverlight can be run on mac and windows, but can only be written form windows [easily], and Air is a commercial product so not free, and far as I know I haven't seen it on *nix yet).
silverlight is still so new and because 99.99% of all web users have yet to install it yet, I would be a bit leary to use it in a web site as a flash replacement. The bottom line for today is that for stuff like that you should probably use flash. Flash is installed in a high % of browsers, works in a variety of Operating Systems and is stable. However - Many things I see people doing with Flash, I can tell can be done with JQuery, which is a killer javascript library for doing lots of cool things people have been using flash to do. I always felt that the "dynamic html"/javascript environment was neglected because MS and others feel it is too powerful and would take their propriety option off the table. Why did it take an independent group of open source developers to come up with a library like JQuery. My new javascript widgets are now doing stuff that used to be limited to flash and can run in all the browsers well. (thus no big download for the user). I'm a "MS Guy" too. I just wouldnt recommend going to silverlight in the browser right now. I also wouldnt recommend Java. IMHO, Java had its chance but blew it. I am actually a Java 2 Certified Developer and have made many $$ building corporate Java applications since the late 90s. However, Sun made some critical blunders and lost its momentum, such as playing games with open source or not. Now that Oracle actually owns Java (and MySQL), I'm more against Java than ever. Larry scares me and is not someone I want to have as "king" over my dev platform!
There are a lot of assertions made in that post that I agree except the last one. Since you are and 'MS GUY', I suppose you have the money to pay for MS windows servers, Visual studio and all the expensive .NET libraries. but that doesn't mean open source is bad. Java is here to stay since Java is not just about sun or oracle. Check here to see what else Java is used for http://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html
Actually .NET and C# because open source ECMA standards while Java was still proprietary property of Sun. Also, you dont have to use Visual Studio as Sharp Develop is a good open source dev environment written in C#. Also, I can run my sophisticated and large asp.net application framework CMS, forums, ecommerce on Apache in Linux using the Mono library. Mono is an independent group of open source developers implementing the .NET and C# ECMA standards on Windows, Mac, Linux and even a few main frame environments.
Not accurate. Proof here http://riastats.com/# Not intended to be a replacement Comparing Oranges to Oranges instead of apples then that would be Flex and I'd agree but not completely. I've foudn Silverlight to be stable Agreed
Outdated objections. Using the websitespark program you can use MS software for three years for $100. If you can't get your business going in that time then you won't need any server software.