Web Standards alternatives to Flex/Silverlight (I mean serious alternatives, not just JS framewoks)

Question

Is there a set of open standards technologies that I can use to achieve the same way of development as in Flex and Sivlerlight? I am talking about componentization, separation of concerns, rich graphics, states and effects . Please point out some tutorials and other resources if possible.

P.S. I KNOW that this is technically possible, so please do not respond by sending google search results or general JQuery tutorials. I've seen those already. I need to know how a Flex / Silverlight developer could design and implement an application in roughly the same way (imagine a rich HTML tag set, much like XAML/MXML, behind which stands JavaScript responsible for handling events and business logic. Think also about binding)

Answer 1

GWT (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) comes to mind. Or maybe OpenLaszlo (http://www.openlaszlo.org/).

OpenLaszlo is quite close to Flex in phylosophy, but can target either the Flash VM or just plain Javascript. So it seems to fulfil the "web standard based" requirement.

I havent used OpenLaszlo since 2005, and at that time it definitly was not ready for a serious application. But things might have changed since then ...

Answer 2

You can also check ExtJS (http://www.extjs.com/) and their newly released Designer (http://www.extjs.com/blog/?p=2946) is it "standards based" RIA JavaScript framework.

Here is a list of examples showing what it is capable of http://www.extjs.com/products/js/

For vector graphics you can use great JavaScript library for SVG: http://raphaeljs.com/index.html

For raster graphics you have Canvas API and explorercanvas (http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/) library from Google for IE compatibility

If ExtJS charts are not enough for you, you can try HighCharts: http://highcharts.com which uses Canvas SVG or VML for rendering.

Answer 3

Have you considered using all the new technology under the HTML5 umbrella, such as SVG, Canvas, HTML5 tags, CSS3, Transforms, Geolocation, Web Workers, Offline Storage etc. You can make some pretty amazing RIAs with that, and it's all open standards. Of course you'll be limiting yourself browser wise, at least initially.

Check out this HTML5 presentation written in HTML5 http://apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1 (warning needs upto date browser such as Opera, Chrome or Safari).