Use of RIA sometimes limits the audience that you are targetting and hence one needs to be cautious when delivering this to multiple browsers and also to various user groups

I guess you have left out the JavaWebstart distrubution model that makes java SWING very viable option.

With JRE installation process(both in terms of size and installation ease) becoming more like out Flash plug in and Groovy/F3 scripting support for generating UIs might make SWING more lucrative compared to Flash.

The applications listed here http://java.sun.com/products/jfc/tsc/sightings/index.html are really good sample applications.

I guess GWT value proposition is undervalued, It can empower java web developer as there is greater possibility of synergy b/w GWT plugins & various framework like Spring, Webwork….
http://cwiki.apache.org/S2PLUGINS/gwt-plugin.html

OpenLaszlo is a lot more than the pure Flex SDK: the server handles SOAP calls for the Flash client, there’s a media transcoder integrated, a well working runtime debugger, etc. Besides that we have our own animation and layout engine which is not bound to the Flash timeline. That’s the reason why the OpenLaszlo DHTML/AJAX applications give the amazing user experience and animation quality you see in the Flash based applications as well.

For larger professional RIA projects Laszlo offers the Webtop, a commercial high level framework for developing window based or standard portals with OpenLaszlo. Part of the framework handles the complex animation flows you need for creating a cinematic user experience. I doubt that you’ll be quicker developing complex portals with the Adobe product line compared to Webtop.

I’ve been building complex OpenLaszlo apps without any visual tools and never ran into problems I couldn’t manage. But it takes a bit to get used to the nature of the LZX programming language if you have a strong Java or .NET background.

Raju, OpenLaszlo Community Manager

Most of the observations above are valid for sites where you use one off flash widgets on primarily html sites ( typical media sites). The higher the size and complexity of your rich application – the more the equation changes. So If you are talking about a complex application development, Java swings will come back as a very strong contender.

I have workd with Openlaszlo a bit. It has flash compilation bugs which are easy to uncover, but then it works well enough to be usable.

However when professionally carrying out large flash based applications – or a factory of supported widgets – Flex does bring in its advantages.

Flex has a full suite, with laszlo being equalent of Flex SDK only. Flex gives you IDE, server connectivity etc. which can save you a lot of time for flex based applications. However when just using few flash widgets across pages, you are not able to utilize flex’s additional capacity well.

I donot know Backbase well enough so cant comment.