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By Jennifer deJong
October 1, 2008 —
Once just a way to spruce up static Web pages, rich Internet application technology is moving into the realm of real applications. Two developments are driving the shift.
First, RIA frameworks such as Microsoft Silverlight and Sun Java FX let developers choose RIA tools tied to their respective Java and .NET development platforms. That offers alternatives to market leader Adobe's Flash and its companion Flex offering, which some claim are geared more to designers than to developers. More important, it moves RIA beyond its roots as a separate, specialized technology, making it a set of capabilities within the development platform.
Second, although RIA technology originated as a way to create a better online experience—adding such elements as animation to previously static Web pages—it is emerging as a powerful way to create desktop applications designed to run offline and synchronize with data when connected to the Web. “We call them rich Internet apps, but they will be used on the desktop, too,” said Jacob Lehrbaum, senior product line manager for Sun's JavaFX. “Where the RIA is running doesn’t really matter.”
New development frameworks may remake the RIA landscape long term, but thus far they have had little impact. Viewing RIA content on the Web requires a proper execution environment—and the Flash player is “on people’s machines,” said Greg DeMichillie, director of product management for developer tools at Adobe.
“Flash is consumed by 98% of Internet browsers,” said ZapThink analyst Ron Schmelzer. It’s not that other RIA development frameworks don’t work, he said. “But at this point there is just much more Flash.”
Flash’s installed base is its only advantage, said Patrick Hynds, president of .NET consultancy CriticalSites. From a developer’s standpoint, Flash and its companion Flex (an abstraction layer that handles data access and other services) are difficult to program. “There is a lot of hack, a lot of heavy lifting—particularly around tasks such as synchronizing audio and video,” Hynds said.
But developers who use Flash and Flex are likely to stick with those offerings for now. “People don’t throw away their platform for a better tool overnight,” said Hynds.
Flash has the potential to create great things, said Microsoft director of rich client platforms Brad Becker, “but Flash development is a specialized skill.” Flash is organized around frame rates, movie clips and other concepts that are likely to be more intuitive to designers than to developers, he said, so those who aren’t designers find “you really have to develop in a bizarre way.”
Flash development is a niche market, Becker added, observing that many Flash developers come from the marketing and advertising worlds. “They are not object-oriented programmers.”
Adobe’s DeMichillie said RIA content creation is a joint undertaking between developers and designers. “Developers create applications that look better and work better, and that involves designers,” he said. The combination of Flash and Flex offers “a complete stack.”
ZapThink’s Schmelzer also argued that “Flex is appealing to developers,” noting while Flash originated in the design world, Flex did not. Adobe acquired Flex when it bought Macromedia in 2005, and “Macromedia had roots in the development world,” Schmelzer said, citing the company’s ColdFusion offering, a programming language for creating dynamic Web pages.
Debate aside, RIA tools tied to the environment in which developers work every day offer them a different experience from using Flash and Flex. “When you are using C# [in Silverlight], it’s not about movie clips and time lines,” said Becker, who worked for Macromedia before it was acquired by Adobe.
The experience is different because Silverlight has hooks into .NET, added Hynds. “You can write C# code. You can write VB.NET code.”
Similarly, Java FX runs on top of Java, said Sun’s Lehrbaum. “It’s not a new platform.”
Adam Calderon, a practice lead for .NET consultancy Interknowlogy, likes Silverlight because for the most part it looks and feels much like other Microsoft development offerings. “You get the total integration of all the tools [in one development suite],” he said.
For example, Calderon said, the personalization preferences he specified in Microsoft’s Web development offering ASP.NET can be applied in Silverlight: “I am Adam. I like a blue background, with these things on my home page.”
But some aspects of Silverlight are not fully baked, said Calderon. “There are some challenges around data binding. The approach is similar to that used in WPF, but it is not the same,” he said, referring to Windows Presentation Foundation, the graphical subsystem in .NET 3.0. Silverlight is currently is in release 1.0; Microsoft is expected to make Silverlight 2.0 available this fall.
Kill the Portal
The real opportunity for RIA technology is not sprucing up websites, but “killing the corporate portal” and replacing it with RIA-based desktop applications, said ZapThink’s Schmelzer. Essentially collections of disparate information used by employees, corporate portals were supposed to make life easier. But many were inefficient, offering access only to sales leads, contacts and other data “you could have [stored] in Microsoft Outlook,” he said.
RIA-based desktop apps allow employees to access more timely sales data, for example, Schmelzer said. “What are other salespeople working on? What is this customer’s sales history? You don’t want to be sitting in front of the customer without having any idea of what that customer just bought.” RIA-based desktop apps essentially bridge client server and Web apps, he said.
They also provide an opportunity to interact with other applications, said DeMichillie, referring to Adobe’s AIR offering, which lets RIA technology run on the desktop.
A key application for RIA is redoing the user interface of enterprise applications, said Microsoft’s Becker. “With legacy apps, the user interface is an afterthought. You need a way to book a flight or file an expense report that is not incredibly painful.” Use of RIA technology for such applications introduces “new ways of delivering content” and “blurs the line between browser-based and desktop applications,” wrote Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond in a June 2007 report, “Rich Internet Apps Move Beyond the Browser.”
But to date, RIA technology has not been widely used, said CriticalSites’ Hynds. “Unless the company is a dot-com doing Web 2.0 development, it’s not that common.”
“We are the beginning of this trend, not the end,” said Adobe’s DeMichillie. But “it is rapidly growing, and we will see more and more of it.”
Related Search Term(s): RIA
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