Google Australia team member Pamela Fox explains HTML5 vs Flex for rich internet applications in this O'Reilly video from Ignite Sydney. She compares openness, UI components, vector graphics, 3D, bitmap manipulation, video, file system access, development environments, testing options, compatibility, and more - all in 5 minutes or so. Nice job, Pamela!

The entire Adobe Platform Evangelism team is in London this week. And team member James Ward has announced that he is presenting "RIAs with Java, Spring, Hibernate, BlazeDS, and Flex" to the London Java Community.

Want to join the Adobe RIA team? We are looking for a talented and highly motivated Architect or Technical lead to help deliver the next generation presentation services (composite RIA, mashups and client architecture). A successful candidate will have a proven track record as a client side architect on enterprise applications and RIA frameworks. See this job posting.

Fellow Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt has recorded two useful videos for Adobe Developer Connection. In RIA Problems You Never Expected: Too Many Screens he explains how multiple screens in a rich internet application can exceed the abilities of the client machine, and shows how to achieve swift and seamless response time with creation queuing techniques. In RIA Problems You Never Expected: Wasted Resources he explains how virtual lists improve application performance by reducing rendering time. You can watch both videos in under 10 minutes, and in doing so I think you'll find the time well spent.

Great Indian Developer Summit is one of the premier India tech conferences and events. And this year they are featuring a series of talks on Rich Internet Application development. The web site features rotating banners highlighting different speakers and sessions, and this is the banner highlighting the "team of killer RIA experts".

And who are these experts? From left to right, the first five (Anirudh, Harish, Raghu, Ramesh and Sujit) are members of the Evangelism team, and the next two (Rakshith and Hemant) are members of the ColdFusion engineering team!

Nice to see recognition where deserved!

Michael Chaize is an Adobe Consultant in France, and he also teaches Flex in a school in Paris. He recently ran an "AIR Idol" contest for his students, and the apps they built are really impressive. The students have also published the applications they developed during 2008. Good stuff!

Just a reminder, there are several ColdFusion 8 e-seminars coming up:

• Upgrading Seamlessly to ColdFusion 8 - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT and Wednesday, February 18, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.
• ColdFusion-Powered Rich Internet Applications - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.
• Beyond HTML: Using Ajax, PDF, and More to Create Engaging Applications with ColdFusion 8 - Wednesday, February 11, 2009 11:00 A.M. PDT.

Obviously, I think you're better off building Flex clients, but ... if you are tinkering with Silverlight, Andrew Powell explains how to power your apps using ColdFusion and AMF.

I just arrived in Wroclaw, 4th largest city in Poland, home to about 650,000, and the location for RIA Day 2008 today. I am presenting an opening session as well as a session on data services. Other sessions are covering Flash, Flex, AIR, and ColdFusion. We're still a couple of hours from start time, so not many people here yet. But, apparently, the event sold out entirely within two days, so am looking forward to a packed room. Which reminds me, I have to finish my opening presentation ...

Software Development Times On The Web is running a story entitled Movin' on up on RIA, Flex, AIR, Silverlight, Java FX, and more.

Kristen Schofield wants you to take a short RIA survey, and in return she'll share CF8 tag posters.

David Tucker has been publishing a weekly roundup of all of the RIA news for O'Reilly Inside RIA, and now presents the content in a weekly podcast that covers all major RIA technologies and platforms.

The Ajax Experience is a Web 2.0 centric conference now in its third year. Adobe is a sponsor of this year's event in Boston, and fellow evangelist Kevin Hoyt will be speaking about AIR and more.

Is Microsoft using Flash embedded in their Silverlight Windows ads? Fellow evangelist Raghu seems to have found evidence that makes his post a most intriguing read.

We've had to make some minor MAX scheduling changes. My 3 hour hands-on MAX session Getting Started with Real-Time Flex and AIR via LiveCycle Data Services has been moved to Wednesday, November 19th, 9:00am-12:30pm. That's the bad news. The good news is that the room we're in accommodates over 200 people, and there are still some open slots left. I hope to see you there, and don't forget to bring your laptop!

I previously mentioned that Adobe and Zend were partnering to make Flex and PHP play better together, and today InfoWorld published some more information on the partnership.

We're hosting eSeminars on both ColdFusion and Flex, with the first session (ColdFusion-powered Rich Internet Applications) tomorrow at 2:00pm US East Coast time. Details are posted online for the Adobe ColdFusion 8 eSeminar Series and the Adobe Flex eSeminar Series for Developers.

Joe Rinehart has written an article for Dr. Dobb's entitled Building RIAs on J2EE Foundations. Joe explains RIA development from a very ColdFusion and Flex centric view of the world, and walks through an example in detail. Nice job, Joe!

As a general rule, you want to be using AMF for communication between Flash Player on the client (running a Flash or Flex app) and your back-end server (unless you need messaging and push and data management services, in which case LiveCycle Data Services is what you'll want).

Lee Brimelow explains this (and lists AMF options for different back-ends) in a recent post entitled What the hell is AMF? And James Ward demonstrates the performance implications in his Census - RIA Data Loading Benchmarks.

Long time ColdFusion/Flex/AIR/ etc. friend, Chong-Bing Liu (aka Bing) wrote an article comparing RIA trends (including Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX, and Curl) by using Google Trends. The original article is in Chinese, and he just just posted an English translation.

Adobe Developer Connection is running an article by Scott Stroz entitled Easy rich Internet applications with ColdFusion 8. The article, which was originally published by SitePoint, introduces ColdFusion 8 Ajax functionality, and walks through building a sophisticated ColdFusion powered Ajax based Rich Internet Application.