Top Ajax Technologies and RIA Frameworks

The Gartner RIA Report in 2010 rated 22 Ajax technologies and RIA Frameworks. They define the Ajax/RIA market as "a set of technology offerings oriented to meeting the needs of application development teams to build systems that deliver a rich and responsive user experience."

I was surprised by which technologies were included in the list and those that were not. Some of them are inactive, woefully incomplete, or inaccessible. Other open-source frameworks, like MooTools and Laszlo, that have been around for 5+ years and have active communities, were not listed.

So here is a more comprehensive list of RIA frameworks and Ajax technologies. But instead of rating them by market scope, I rated them on:

Completeness of their UI control set, based on the list of essential controls
Usability of the controls
Aesthetics, based on the default visual design. Now, all of these frameworks/technologies are skinnable, or offer themes, but some are almost impossible to make look good.

I also included links to each of their demo galleries you can explore their offerings.

Disclaimer: I am a UI designer not a developer. I can only comment on the usability and aesthetics of the controls in these frameworks, not the ease of use from a development perspective or the quality of the code.

Technology/Framework	Completeness	Usability	Aesthetics
**Sencha, Ext for JS
**Sencha, Ext for GWT
*JQuery, JQuery UI			varies
*Adobe Flex
Telerik for .Net, Silverlight, WFP
Component Art for .Net, Silverlight, WFP
*Oracle ADF
Backbase
*Mocha UI for MooTools
*MooTools			varies
SmartClient for GWT
*Java FX
Infragistics for .Net, WPF, Silverlight
*ICEfaces
*RichFaces for JSF
*Dojo, Dojo X, Dijit
*Open Laszlo
*MS Silverlight 4
Visual Web Gui
*YUI2, YUI 3
*ZK
Wijmo
*Vaadin for GWT
Windows Presentation Framework
*Apache Pivot
*SproutCore
Prototype / Scriptaculous			varies
*JQuery Tools
*LivePipe
*Jitsu