I went out last night and caught the late showing of The Dark Night. I love that Batmobile, but I can?t imagine driving it to work.  I would rather drive Bruce Wayne?s Lamborghini!  But even the Lamborghini is not exactly a utilitarian vehicle. I mean I can?t imagine taking my wife and four kids on a camping trip in a Lamborghini.  I would rather drive my Chevy Suburban.

The Batmobile, Lamborghini and the Suburban all have strengths and weakness depending on the context in which they are used. The fact is you have to choose the right vehicle for the job at hand. This is also true of RIA platforms.

Let say you have to enrich the user experience of a commercial shopping site like Amazon.com or The Gap. You are probably going to use something fairly lightweight like Ajax.  On the other hand, if you want to provide a beautiful animation for Disney you?ll use Flex or Silverlight, not Ajax.  Flex might be good for one site and Silverlight another. Ajax framework ?X? here and Ajax framework ?Y? there. You get the picture.

My platform of choice is Curl, a RIA platform that started as a DARPA funded research project at MIT more than a decade ago. As a RIA platform Curl is very mature and extremely powerful, but it?s not appropriate for all use cases. For example, I wouldn?t build a mass consumer web site with Curl because the Curl runtime is not very common. I would use Ajax or Flex instead.  At the same time I wouldn?t build a processing intensive data visualization tool or an advanced product configuration interface (think thousands of parts) using Ajax or Flex either. I would use Curl. 

Curl is a powerhouse; it is the Batmobile of the RIA platforms. But its most appropriate for enterprise and scientific computing - its not always the best choice for mass consumer applications. For mass consumer applications I would choose Flex, Silverlight or Ajax - these are the Lamborghinis and Suburbans of the RIA platforms.  Flex, Silverlight and Ajax are best suited, in my opinion, for every day use (Suburban) or for glitz and glam (Lamborghini), not for mission critical industrial strength jobs (Batmobile). For mission critical industrial strength jobs that require intensive processing and the ability to handle huge data sets I choose Curl.  

When you choose a RIA platform you have to consider many things and in many cases Ajax, Flash/Flex, or Silverlight will do the job nicely.  But there are occasions when you need something much more powerful and that?s when you should take a serious look at Curl.  Don?t drive the Batmobile to work and don?t drive the Suburban into a battle with evil. Use the right platform for the job.