DHH is (obviously) David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Rails) and RIA (in this context) means Rich Internet Applications. And here is the quote:
I think there's always room for new ideas, but I don't think that the whole fuss that's currently going on about RIA, rich Internet applications, is justified. I think we've been through this cycle so many times before that it in some ways amazes me how history seems to be ignored. We went through this with Java applets, they were going to rule the Web. Everything was going to be in a Java applet. HTML and CSS is history. And Flash came around, and Flash started focusing on applications. Now Flash is going to rule the Web and HTML and so on is yesterday. Now, Silverlight, Apollo, JavaFX, they're all bidding to take over the JavaScript, HTML and CSS [spaces], and I just don't buy it. I don't buy that developers by and large are going to jump into a proprietary technology and replace what HTML and CSS has given them.
After Adobe's Apollo and Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun has addes own version of scriptable, interactive platform named JavaFX. Unlike the previous three (Flash included), this is going to be Open Sourced - under the Microsoft's most hated license - GPL.
Now the race to replace Flash really becomes really interesting ...
As Murphy said - you cannot do just one thing. Thanks to JDK 1.4 entering end-of-life support period (and 1.3 being unsupported for some time), we need to move few applications happily running on these antique Java platforms to at least Java 5 and gain few more years of uninterrupted Sun-supported life.
Upgrading the applications was as expected, piece of cake - as long as you have solid build environment with build scripts and everything - which we certainly do. Ant runs on Java5 exactly as well as on 1.4 (maybe faster, but I did not measure), Tomcat was the same no-brainer thing and switching the Eclipse required only selecting different JRE in preferences window. Codewise, the only change required inside the application code was renaming few identifiers to something else than enum, which happens to be keyword in Java 5.
After almost two years of uninterrupted C# and .NET development, I have got back for few days to Java world. One of our old customers asked us to do few enhancements and changes in the application we wrote. And because we always stand behind our work, always do answer the call for help and do support our customers as long as they want to be supported, I have squeezed-in few days worth of work into pretty packed schedule. So here am I on a short detour into world of class files and jars ...
I had a brief MSN chat with friend of mine today, who tried to install and use Vista as development platform. I mean install on the real hardware, in order to use it as core operating system. I have no feedback yet on how Visual Studio works, but as he found out, his Ant build files he uses to compile and deploy Java programs stopped working - because Vista did not allow to copy Javascript files. I can understand why Javascript files are treated with caution - however, it should not be considered the same when a file is copied from a local file to a local file, rather then downloaded from the internet.