Nothing like a bit of repartee between developers. Earlier this week Tom Yager declared that AIR gets rich apps right, a belief Martin Heller counters is “a bit over the top.” Specifically, Yager asserted that Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), “solves all of the major issues keeping the browser from being a common front end for applications,” in this Ahead of the curve post. Heller, too, likes AIR and enough so that he’d recommend it to Flash and Flex developers creating desktop apps. “But there I stop.” “I have been shipping browser-based applications that look and act like Windows desktop applications for awhile now without any need for Flash or AIR,” Heller explains in Adobe AIR is nice, but not the next big thing. And then there’s Microsoft’s Silverlight, of which Yager writes, “I can’t bring myself to imagine what adding Silverlight to the mix would do.” Heller takes issue with that. “Having played with Silverlight quite a bit, I can say that Silverlight will not end the world as we know it: in the right hands, Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, really dances and sings … But there I stop.” Is AIR the next big thing, or just another RIA tool? Talkback below. Software Development