Apple is in the process of developing an alternative to Adobe Flash for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIA) codenamed “Gianduia” after a famous Italian hazelnut chocolate.

Gianduia will be based on Java Script and Web Objects and will be the client side framework for developing RIA for mobile browsers. What separates it from Adobe Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight is that it’s standards based and non-proprietary – points that Steve Jobs emphasized in his recent blog post aimed at Adobe Flash.

There are no solid details of Gianduia as of yet but an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) presentation at the annual WOWODC (World of WebObjects Developer Conference) that runs in the sidelines of Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developer Conference) showed the power of Gianduia. Currently Apple uses Cappuccino, SproutCore and JavaScriptMVC for developing RIA for it’s mobile devices.

After the official release of Gianduia, will it succeed to replace Flash as the dominant choice for writing RIAs?

As for the performance of all these platforms, even Apple’s advocated HTML5 Canvas runs 3 times slower in iPod touch 3G compared with Google’s Nexus One. This experiment is an interesting find.

[via AppleInsider]