The Who, What and Where of Rich Internet Applications
RIA, one of the buzz words circling around the Web 2.0 phenomenon, stands for Rich Internet Application. Ask ten people for their definition of RIA and you will most likely get 10 farily different answers. RIA offers traditional desktop application features and functionalities, but the application resides on the web. RIAs combine the reach of the Internet with what you would consider desktop like software features and functionality via a rich and compelling user interface. The goal is to provide a greater level of satisfaction and success in a user’s web-based interactions, be it business or pleasure.
Although the term “Rich Internet Application” was introduced on a white paper published by Macromedia in early 2002, the concept had existed for several years. Companies like Borland (Delphi Pascal) and Microsoft (VB) have supported the RIA type concepts since the 90’s . It is just now that we are really seeing the maturation of RIA, due to technology advancements like being able to access the clients hard drive via the web. Remote Scripting, by Microsoft is another example of a pre RIA technology.
RIAs are also becoming increasingly popular and accepted. According to Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/), mainstream adoption and critical mass among IT and commercial software projects will occur by 2008, and at least 60 percent of new application development projects will include RIA technology by 2010.
The progression and success of Gmail, Google Docs, Flickr and several other fledgling web applications prove that the Rich Internet Application as a computing standard is going to stick around for a while. But beware there are security issues that need to be addressed…we will get into that snake pit on another issue.
Drag & drop, partial screen refresh, cool widgets, 3rd party integration, add-ons and the use of sliders to manipulate data are just a few examples of RIA functionalities. Allowing off-line use of web applications is another hallmark of RIA technology that is getting more and more attention. Adobe Air and Google Gears are a few of the applications that are giving us the ability to never get off of our computers. Good or Bad Idea…you decide.
Within the RIA environment the client and server computing resources are better balanced. This resource management balancing act frees up server resources, which ultimately enables the server hardware to handle more sessions concurrently.
The network traffic is also reduced significantly by the intelligence of client application since it is only requesting the required data individually and asynchronously.
The following technologies are some of the popular Platforms and Methods being used to build RIA’s:
ActiveX Controls
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flex
Backbase
Curl
Google GWT
JavaFX
JavaScript (Ajax)
Microsoft Silverlight
OpenLaszlo
