Sun Microsystems is out with an answer to Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight Rich Internet Application tools: JavaFX. At the JavaOne show in San Francisco today, Sun's head of software, Rich Green, discussed what to expect from the new offering.

In another “not quite Windows Live but still cool” post, Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems, is now available in both Silverlight v1.o and 2.0 builds. Silverlight, while it still has a long way to go to become as widely adapted as Adobe’s Flash, is leading the charge for Microsoft to become a more open eco-system for development.

HTML is basically a standard for structuring and presenting content in the internet and HTML5 is the newest incarnation of HTML. HTML5 is supposed to have features like video playback which currently depends upon third-party(and proprietary) browser plug-ins like Adobe Flash.

Multimedia browser plug-in Silverlight targets Adobe, aims at bringing animation, video and other rich media to Web-based applications.

"While you might have heard of Flash, SilverLight etc which are proprietary application frameworks to create RIA(Rich Internet Application) and have been developed by Adobe and Microsoft respectively. But did you know that Firefox has inbuilt support for various frameworks such as SVG, Theora and OGG, which can be used to create and build RIAs..."

The beta version of Moonlight 1.0 is now available to download as a Firefox plug-in. The application, is the Linux version of Microsoft's rival to Flash, Silverlight. It makes it possible to play files such as WMV files under Linux. Novell has been granted access to Microsoft specifications and to multimedia codecs and test tools for the project.

After years of HTML standardization disarray, browser makers Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and most recently Google now are hammering out new directions for Web standards.

French video portal Dailymotion is ditching the use of proprietary plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight for its "pré bêta" Dailymotion site. Instead, the open video site is exploring the possibilities offered by HTML 5 and the pre-release version of Firefox 3.5.

Novell has released Moonlight 2.0, a major update to its open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application framework. The new version introduces support for managed code and the DLR.