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Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1
superapecommando writes "The richest RIA platforms today (and for the foreseeable future) come from clashing titans Adobe and Microsoft, whose Flash and Silverlight platforms both combine excellent tools for developers and designers, broad client support, strong support for server-side technologies, digital rights management capabilities, and the ability to satisfy use cases as varied as enterprise dashboards, live video streaming, and online games. And each has spawned new updates, to Flash 10.1/AIR 2 and Silverlight 4 respectively, which put them on a near-level playing field. Which one should you choose?"
Java's layout managers are pretty atrocious ... the gridbag layout managed to achieve a state of sadomasochistic perfection that hasn't been seen since the Middle Ages when plague victims would whip themselves for thinking God was mad at them. But the whole state of UI developing is nightmarish. Whenever I nested layers upon layers of layout managers, I felt like an ancient Incan, setting traps in a tomb for any poor suckers wishing to alter my application UI. Of course, that poor sucker was usually me.
In any case, some dude actually realized the insanity of the process and wrote his own layout manager called Mig Layout which puts an end to nesting and actually makes sense. Dare I say easy? I rewrote my last app in it and never turned back. Give it whirl although keep the retard with the bat around just in case.
When I was developing a Silverlight 2.0 application almost two years ago, we had something similiar to this issue when (I believe) your plugin version did not match the version of Silverlight coded for. More specifically, when Silverlight 3 was available/installed it would complain to us to install Silverlight, when in reality we should have been downgrading to continue supporting our Silverlight 2.0 app.