With Microsoft’s introduction of Silverlight and Sun’s introduction of JavaFX the Rich Internet Application arena is going to be the stage of lots of battles in the next year over dominance of this field, traditionally owned by Flash. Sun, however, has given JavaFX a huge boost: the fact that it is open source, it runs on all platforms java runs on (every one), and it has access to all the java libraries (wich outweighs .Net and Flash combined by a large margin). Until now there has been a major road block however, the fact that Java has a large foot print and downloading and installing it takes time and isn’t as painless as Flash has been. However, with the upcoming release of Update N, Sun is attempting to provide that same capability, installing a tiny foothold into the browser initially and getting updates as needed. This change to the Java classloader is very significant, and although it won’t happen soon in the long run Java/JavaFX has a good chance of competing with Javascript (ECMAscript) itself.