While the landscape for rich Web development technologies is getting crowded, industry dignitaries at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif. Thursday nonetheless saw a place for the various entrants in this space. The field of technologies has grown to include AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript), Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun's JavaFX, said Neal Ford, application architect for Thoughtworks, who moderated a panel addressing rich Web development. Audience members also gave a nod to the Ruby, Python, and Groovy languages.

Many years ago, O’Reilly’s UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins helped me get up and running with the cryptic operating system, and I’ve been a big fan of the In a Nutshell series ever since. So I was anxious to tackle XAML in a Nutshell by Lori A. MacVittie with the hopes of gaining a better understanding of the new technology. Find out why I give this programming book a mixed review.

Silverlight is all about making the graphical interactivity of the WPF interface work in a Web browser and across operating systems. The plug-in is a big part of that, because it will eventually include the Common Language Runtime component of .NET. XAML is another big part, because Silverlight shares a subset of XAML with the WPF.

XAML.Net is a website dedicated to informing you of all things XAML

Programming techniques continue to evolve, and with evolution comes opportunity. The success of the Web, in conjunction with the demand for rich clients and rapid development, has spawned a new generation of declarative languages. XUL, Macromedia's Flex, Microsoft's XAML, and Xamlon, Inc.'s Xamlon Pro 1.1 are designed to enable rapid, XML-based application develoment with access to structured programming languages for application logic