Web Worker Daily

Oliver says: May 23rd, 2007 7:19am

I do not need rich internet applications. What I need are applications that work both online and offline out of the browser.

Jake says: May 23rd, 2007 7:19am

Nope, I like my Web applications simple with just a touch of AJAX where it improves the user experience.

Serge Lescouarnec says: May 23rd, 2007 7:24am

I often get turned off when I get to a site and I have to wait for the animation to play before I get to the content itself.

Another problem with Flash based sites, is (correct me if I am wrong) that they do not have the usual page index.

Take care

Serge
Blog:
http://www.sergetheconcierge.com

tiffany says: May 23rd, 2007 7:29am

I find that I’m moving more and more into the browser. I use web-based email, calendaring, bookmarking, feed reader and storage applications. I also use a web-based project management/CRM tool (dotProject, although I’m giving SugarCRM a test-drive), and I’m completely in love with Zoho’s Office suite.

I do occasionally find myself using desktop and web apps in a complementary way. I’ll sometimes create a document offline, then import it into an online app for storage and future access.

I accept RIAs for what they are and where they are. A limited feature set is the trade off for greater access. But I find that I most of the web apps I use do most of what I need them to do most of the time.

My biggest concern is portability. Give me the ability to export all of my documents at once in case you go out of business or something.

zemote says: May 23rd, 2007 7:51am

There is always going to be a hybrid of Internet apps and Desktop Apps. The more features you need, the more your going to steer clear of Internet apps.

ajaxus says: May 23rd, 2007 7:57am

RIA is nice, ajax is good thing to have also! but what matters most is the use of all these to get your job done!

We used to get things right like 5 years ago when nobody was speaking for web 2.0 and RIA!

Best

pffft says: May 23rd, 2007 9:02am

Whatever can eliminate excessive page reloads on submit works for me.

However, I still don’t think web apps and broadband connections are robust enough compared to other compiled apps.

Also, the online/offline problem is a HUGE issue for webapps that many web developers like to ignore.

mrtopher says: May 23rd, 2007 9:43am

In my opinion, RIA is a phrase that was developed by Adobe (or Macromedia at the time) just for marketing purposes. They were seeing less use of Flash for entire web sites and needed a way to show that it’s still useful in this age of web based applications.

I think Ajax can accomplish a majority of what Flash can in Rich Internet Applications and with less of a learning curve for developers.

» Did anyone complain about the graphics in Super Mario Bros? | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com says: May 23rd, 2007 9:52am

[...] an open thread going on over at Web Worker Daily that asks, do Rich Internet Applications matter to you. Anne Zelenka has some commentary about what she thinks of RIAs and makes the point I see a lot, [...]

Ryan Stewart says: May 23rd, 2007 9:56am

I can never get trackbacks from ZDNet to post, but here’s my response - http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=389

Anne, one of these days I am going to convert you. When that happens, I am going to host a party and celebrate. :)

=Ryan
Adobe Evangelist

Ryan Stewart says: May 23rd, 2007 9:56am

Wow, so trackbacks are working. I feel like a dummy.

David Fre says: May 23rd, 2007 10:33am

I also find myself using online applications more and more. Tools like Gliffy (for diagrams) or Floorplanner (for architectural floor plans) offer enough functionality for my occasional need for these type of tools and the ability to share and easy access your work on different computers are things that are becoming more important for me these days.

Link Blog: 07 May 2007 - Tyler Reed says: May 23rd, 2007 11:43am

[...] Open Thread: Do Rich Internet Applications Matter to You? - Web Worker Daily [...]

GigaOM » What's on GigaNET says: May 23rd, 2007 12:03pm

[...] Do Rich Internet Applications Matter to You?: Silverlight and Flash aim at the rich internet application space — a perceived gap in what users want and what they are getting from their overly light web apps. The idea is that we need more rich interactivity from our browser apps than they give us. But is this just developer fantasy, or does it represent a real end user need? Continue reading. [...]

Steveo says: May 23rd, 2007 12:28pm

I agree with Ryan - excellent point. I think the root issue is design vs. development. I’m a developer myself and only recently have I started valuing the “ergonomic” value of applications - its all about the marriage of design and function - a balance of art and science. A form in AJAX is that same as a form in Flash - same functionality with different rendering - RIA will prove its value when different methods for manipulating data that can’t be replicated in DHTML come about. I agree with need for online/offline access to apps. And I think this is something that Apollo and Silverlight are aiming to address. Nope..I don’t work for Adobe or Microsoft.

rod says: May 23rd, 2007 12:33pm

I have to say: one thing I loved about the web was the lack of richness - simple, functional UI’s with out the bloat, lag, and clutter of heavy desktop apps like Outlook or Word. IMHO, apps like Yahoo’s new mail are a step backward, while streamlined things like Tumblr are a step in the right direction. Certainly there’s a place for RIA’s (if you’re doing photo editing online, etc), but the application of richness needs to be selective and tasteful.

Sheesh - I’m starting to sound like curmudgeonly Jakob Neilsen.

Alice Marin says: May 23rd, 2007 12:33pm

The browser user experience is clearly inefficient, and insufficient. While AJAX is letting me ditch Flash, it seems like we still need a better model for resident applications and executables. Sun is doing some interesting stuff with Java, I wonder if that will play out. I doubt Silverlight has a prayer, though, talk about proprietary.

jim d. says: May 23rd, 2007 1:17pm

Hi Anne,

I think that, more than anything, these new RIA frameworks provide a more solid, and more formalized foundation for creating the types of applications that we were already able to create with traditional AJAX & DHTML. Even though we have good ajax frameworks like YUI, GWT, and Prototype, they still have the same fundamental problem in that they bend, twist, and arm-wrestle the web browser to behave in a way that it wasn’t originally intended to do.

Gliffy is a perfect example: under the hood of this simple diagram tool is a mountain of javascript code, html, css hacks, etc. I’m guessing that you could rewrite the same tool in Apollo or Silverlight at a fraction of the cost both in terms of time and lines of code.

Anne Zelenka says: May 23rd, 2007 2:22pm

Jim D.: I’m pretty sure Gliffy is Flash-based, so it’d probably qualify as an RIA. Good point that developing with Ajax is very difficult.

Alice: yes, the Java stuff could be interesting too.

Marl Balou says: May 23rd, 2007 2:48pm

In the tech world, we seem to have forgotten that most normal people i.e. end users & folks who run businesses in the rest of the world (outside of Silicon Valley) don’t buy applications based on the technology i.e Rational business people don’t make statement like - “If this is not using AJAX I will not buy it!” OR “I will only use applications authored in Ruby and using Rails!”. At the end of the day, people running serious businesses will buy solutions that best solves their pain or needs. Each class of technologies used to create and deliver the application(s) has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The user will make their choice(s) after weighing the pros & cons of each application.

Hence the question “Do Rich Internet Applications matter to you?” is a tech-centric view and the wrong question. Within the application taxonomy, there is a continuum from the fully hosted pure HTML browser based application to the totally offline desktop application– in between these, we have rich AJAX browser based application, richer Flash runtime based application and even richer Silverlight runtime based application. (And I am sure that over time other solutions will also emerge)
Hosted applications bring a set of advantages:
• Application, data & state roaming both geographically and any device (Constrained by the runtime availability on the device ie basic HTML processing browsers are there on all devices but richer runtimes may not be there in all devices)
• Easy one click non-brittle application deployment ie pure browser app or browser+runtime plug-in based app
• Always on & IT tasks such as backup, security, tuning etc are handled by the provider
• Easy to support multi-user access
• Easy to integrate with other hosted applications

And also bring some disadvantages:
• High latency and sluggish performance if there is a need to work on large data sets
• Harder to build applications that need close interface with multiple peripheral/hardware devices
• Harder to build applications that need quick response time (ie cannot deal with high latency such as Point of Sale applications)
• Cannot do pure offline

In my view, over time the distribution of user population over the range of these applications types could potentially look like a skewed bell curve. The exact distribution will be determined by many factors including infrastructure build out (Internet connectivity, mobile device adoption etc) & size of the different user segments that have differing needs and which class of application solves them best.

David Fre says: May 23rd, 2007 2:49pm

Both Gliffy as Floorplanner are flashbased as far as I know

Anne Zelenka says: May 23rd, 2007 3:19pm

Marl: at WWD, we write for a tech-centric crowd and we don’t consider them abnormal. Starting a discussion based on technology is useful. There are paradigmatic differences in web-native vs. desktop-like apps; it may not be a simple continuum as you propose. I think most techie types can shift between the user interface view and the technology-under-the-covers view with ease. In some cases it doesn’t matter, but in the case of DHTML and the others, it does — because you are nudged towards certain interface styles by DHTML that Flash/Silverlight won’t support and vice versa.

Glenn Feiner says: May 23rd, 2007 5:01pm

Marl, I agree on most of the points. I think there were several posts that are implying it is DHTML vs FLEX/FLASH, SilverLight, etc… I think the most successful websites in the near future will incorporate a mix of technologies, using FLASH only were needed. YouTube is a prime example of this.

Another point to be made (again, mentioned above) is the speed at which the application can be built. Javascript programming is dependant on the browser. Time is needed to debug across at least the three mostly used browsers (IE7,IE6,Firfefox). That still leaves the others out there. There a few great javascript frameworks out there that help, but I would not feel comfortable releasing anything without testing across the platforms. FLASH/FLEX runs in the flash plug-in, installed on 98% of the PCs out there. I’m just getting started with FLEX, but it is pretty straight forward.

My 2 cents….

Thomas says: May 23rd, 2007 8:05pm

I would love to have the snappy experience of a RIA in a desktop application. Especially, because I don’t have internet at home. Meaning I won’t be able to check mail with gmail or use buzzword or writely to edit/write documents. And knowing that such sites have my documents on their server isn’t a nice feeling neither. Brrr .

Don Burnett says: May 23rd, 2007 9:03pm

While I have a tendancy to agree with you for a web application that not all applications need to be RIAs. You seem to be forgetting that Microsoft started out by adding a lot of this “WPF” technology to regular Windows Applications.

Remember what happened when people first got fonts or typefaces in their computers? A lot of documents looked like a ransome note for a while. Then style won out. I would just say that a lot of this is happening with RIA. We’ll see a lot of graphically crazy apps then reality will set in and things will be toned down somewhat. But like typefaces, since then we’ve always had them.

I tend to think that history will find good uses for the technology and the ones that aren’t will not be with us long (it’s called attrition).

Anyway, my view is we are on the cusp of something here, so people should just start looking out for the randsome notes.

Tim Anderson’s ITWriting - Tech writing blog » Why Rich Internet Applications Matter says: May 24th, 2007 2:54am

[...] Rich Internet Applications Matter By Tim Anne Zelenka is sceptical about RIAs: The idea is that we need more rich interactivity from our browser apps than they give us. But is [...]

RIA pedia - Rich Internet Applications - Its all about the user experience! says: May 24th, 2007 6:32am

Why care about rich Internet applications?

There’s an interesting discussion this morning on a few tech focused blogs about whether or not rich Internet applications matter. Anne Zelenka posted her thoughts at Web Worker Daily to get the discussion going, and many people have chimed in, inclu…

Alex says: May 24th, 2007 6:49am

If people don’t care about richness then why the heck people do care about the iPhone???

Sho says: May 24th, 2007 10:29am

Hi Anne. Great thread.

My viewpoint (surprise!) is that RIAs are going to be more and more important over time, and that this trend is inevitable.

In some ways, I wish we’d never used the word “rich,” when describing RIAs, because people associate it with things like gratuitous animations. Yes, I expect RIAs to be highly visual, but only to the extent that it promotes usability and effective understanding.

HTML-based applications are not going to go away in the foreseeable future, but there are limits to what you can do effectively with an HTML-based UI. For more UI intensive applications, I believe that RIA technologies such as Flex and Silverlight will allow you to create applications that are just not possible with HTML. If you haven’t seen it yet, try to get on the Buzzword alpha. It is pretty mind-blowing, and it is just one of the early examples of what we have in store over the next five years as people experiment with the new technologies.

-Sho (Adobe)

Computing webified a bit too much says: May 28th, 2007 4:08am

[...] Check out this article on how much RIA matters to the common man [...]

Rich Internet Applications says: May 28th, 2007 1:05pm

Do Rich Internet Applications Matter to You?

Anne Zelenka discusses whether Rich Internet Applications even matter. A nice discussion ensues.

Robert Smith says: May 31st, 2007 1:35pm

Hi all,

I may be late on this one and I may repeat something that’s been said before, but I do believe RIA’s matter. I don’t think they matter in the traditional sense of surfing the web and finding cool apps. Where RIA’s should (and probably do) matter most is in the business world of intranet apps.
RIA’s take all the advantages the web has to offer (ex. one stop updates for developers) and merge it with the advantages of desktop apps.
With silverlight and/or flex, you can build an app that runs on the client, is less intense on the server than traditional html, has smaller chunks of data going across the network and can persist data. These apps run in a browser, are cross-platform compatible, and can be updated by changing the files in one place.
If you are a business owner and need an app to track internals, I don’t see how you could choose anything else.

FunnsFurmentsGood says: July 9th, 2007 12:10am

Hi all!

Bye

Pure-Essence.Net » adobe flex says: February 14th, 2008 9:30pm

[...] interesting note. the two sides of RIA Do we really need it? vs. Why [...]