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Altio has right click events. I don't have much experience with others, but I'm surprised you haven't found anything else with them. I've even seen a demo of right click menus in AJAX, though it sometimes popped up the browser's right click menu behind the AJAX one in Firefox.

There are cross-platform thin-client network solutions like VNC or Nomachine's NX. They do exactly what the web x.0 wants to do, they do it fast and they do it without all the bloat and packing/unpacking of (essentially very simple) data.

You've got it backwards. VNC and the like send bitmaps across the wire. Bitmaps, even with compression, are more bloated and take more packing and unpacking than simple data. Other reasons to prefer AJAX, Flex, Laszlo, Altio, Nexaweb or other similar frameworks rather than terminal server type products are:

• Responsiveness - each mouse click or keystroke and pixel draw does not have to travel the network.
• Scalability - the client is doing all the UI work, the server only needs to handle serving and saving the data
• Ubiquity - web browsers are everywhere, Flash and Java plugins are nearly everywhere. VNC clients are confined to the IT department's desktops.
• Firewalls - most firewalls will let you through on port 80. Many companies clamp down on port 5301 (or whatever)

Also, the article gets it wrong when it states that these frameworks have suddenly started appearing in the last year since AJAX became popular. Aside from Flex, the products I've named above date back to around 2000. They're becoming more visible now that people are starting to see the possibilities of RIAs, but the 6+ year history behind some of these products means they're already stable, quality frameworks with good developer support.

The standard popup blocking should work for plugins too. It does for Java, my company produces a client/server development tool which pops up windows, and both the Firefox and IE popup blockers handle them just fine, allowing you to click the yellow area to let them through.

If people have to start blocking all popups from plugins just because the browser is not consistent in blocking them, its going to mess things up for the plugins that do it properly.

The standard popup blocking should work for plugins too. It does for Java, my company produces a client/server development tool which pops up windows, and both the Firefox and IE popup blockers handle them just fine, allowing you to click the yellow area to let them through.

If people have to start blocking all popups from plugins just because the browser is not consistent in blocking them, its going to mess things up for the plugins that do it properly.

Salesforce.com have a webservices interface, that can be used by rich clients to deal with the responsiveness problems.

Sure, they can both be built on top of Java, but they need to be built, hence the `Come up with our own competitive stack'.

No, unlike Longhorn/Mono, they do not need to be built, they already have been. There are a number of companies with XAML like technology here and now. I work for one that has been around for 4 years already, and there are many more including some Open Source projects (notably XWT and Luxor). I can't comment on "advanced graphics and rendering", because it is as vague a claim as you'd expect to come out of Microsoft's marketing for a product that is still 2 1/2 years away and slipping.

It sounds like your requirements are quite a close match with AltioLive