Building Rich Internet Applications for the iPhone

So we don't have Flash or Java but that doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of cool ways to build Rich Internet Applications for the iPhone. The fact that we have a full implementation of Safari means that there is a lot of browser power on the iPhone. As I've gotten deeper into AIR and done things like training session with the team from Ext, I've gotten a lot more respect for what Ajax is capable of and how fast Safari is. The success of iPhoneDevCamp showed that there is a ton of interest and a lot of smart people already working on apps. So what can you do to build RIAs on your iPhone?

Right now a lot of people seem to be using Joe Hewitt'siUI JavaScript framework that is pretty cool. From what I heard it was used to build a lot of the apps at iPhoneDevCamp and it was behind the recently released Digg iPhone version.

OpenLaszlo, which has been around the RIA world for a long time, added support for DHTML/JavaScript in OpenLaszlo 4. That meant that the iPhone was a logical jump and they demoed an OpenLaszlo application that ran on the iPhone. So with OpenLaszlo you can build Flash applications, DHTML applications and now iPhone applications all from the same basic code base. That's pretty compelling.

Thanks to Jason for the image