Bye

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.

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

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)

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…

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.

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….