Microsoft made available on Monday Sliverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010, an add-on package for the Visual Studio 2010 IDE providing tooling for the Sliverlight 4 rich Internet plugin-in platform.

Countering rivals Microsoft and Adobe Systems, IBM is offering a free tool to simplify development of JavaScript-based Web applications, featuring use of a modeling language, according to IBM sources.

Google has enhanced its search engine's capacity to index Adobe's Flash files, which are very popular on the Web but tricky for search engine spiders.

Listening to Sun Microsystems heap accolades on its JavaFX multimedia application technology Wednesday evening almost obscured the fact that JavaFX faces quite a battle in the space against the established Adobe Flash and AJAX platforms and Microsoft's up-and-coming Silverlight platform.

Hewlett-Packard has released a free development tool that finds vulnerabilities in Flash, Adobe System's widely used but occasionally buggy interactive Web technology.

Adobe is putting its LiveCycle package for building PDF applications into the cloud.

Finding a single development environment for all purposes has so far proven an unattainable goal. But with the advent of rich Internet applications (RIA), development nirvana gets a bit closer.