Rich Internet Applications: An in-depth look into web applications

Greetings 2.0′ers!

One of the most-visited posts at Cheb 2.0 Web Design blog was the post on ‘An Introduction to Web 2.0′. In fact, it was so popular that I received a dozen emails through my social profiles to write more about the topic of Rich Internet Applications and other Web 2.0 technologies in general. Having at this time just spoken to a friend of mine, Rhys Tague, who had just started his own online endeavours, he seemed to also be very interested in the whole process of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and what they mean in todays’ web world. After a little chat we came up with the idea of him sharing his views on RIA with Cheb 2.0! It would give us his insight into the world of RIA’s - and if that involved a couple of hits his way, then bonus! So let’s see what Rhys has found out about RIA’s through his travels on the web.

Hey Mr. RIA, why the big smile?

Rich Internet Applications are no longer just a craze! They are here to stay.

Ajax, Adobe Flex, OpenLaszlo and Microsoft Silverlight are the major contenders in the arena. Even though I have developed in Ajax, Flex and had a crack at OpenLaszlo as well as Silverlight; I found Flex to be the best! But of course it is personal choice and each one has advantages and disadvantages over each other.

For example, create an advanced web form with Ajax used to provide feedback doesn’t mean that you have developed a rich Internet application. A RIA means that a website or an entire part of the website acts like a traditional desktop application. Facebook, Google Maps, Google Analytics and others in the same class have features of rich Internet application; but do not fulfill the definition of a RIA.

For an Internet application to be a fully fledged RIA, the page should never reload to present information - It should run like an application on your desktop. Instead of reloading pages, it should change states and load information into the user interface components. All of the RIA development technologies I’ve mentioned can perform this functionality. Some examples of full rich Internet applications include Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail, Adobe Buzzword (this one is that good that I typed this article in it!), and Yahoo! Mail. There are a lot more, and these are just the famous ones that I use all the time that you might of heard of.

The time where pages looked pretty and did nothing else is over! Users want to be entertained and be engaged in the content that they receive. Would you come back to a site after you saw the content and you knew that you couldn’t get anything else out of it? Of course not! But say you were overseas and were taking pictures like crazy - and you wanted to send pictures home to show your family members. To your shock and horror, some of the pictures though didn’t look that well. Now if you had a site that allowed you to upload your images online anywhere in the world and edit colour, sharpness, hue, add styles and crop your images; it would solve your dilemma, No?

And after your trip you would most probably still use the site as you found it so helpful! Now you’re most probably saying,”Okay, that is great but how does that relate to a company website?” Well think of a business process or processes that could be automated by the end user. I can think of several.

For example, if your company sold whitegoods and they all came with a 12 month warranty; instead of getting the customer to fill out a warranty card, you could send them online to your warranty centre - where they could lodge their warranty, place a service request, place a warranty request, monitor requests and find support documentation all in one Rich Internet Application. Now of course your company website still needs a section to explain the products and services that your company offers and a section to contact them, but I guess what I am trying to say is that websites now have more potential to be more then just a brochure about your company; It can be a digital extension of your company accessible to the world!

Out of the four technologies that I mentioned, three use plugins to run the RIA capabilities. Ajax is the only one that doesn’t need a plugin to run. This is because Ajax is based off existing technologies that exist in all modern Internet browsers; namely, Javascript and XHTML. It’s not re-inventing the wheel it is just a new way of development by using the Javascript client side script to talk to a server side script (PHP, ASP .Net, etc.), and then presenting it to the user by manipulating XHTML markup. The three technologies that need a plugin to run are Flex, Silverlight and OpenLaszlo. These plugins are installed by the end-user when they want to view the RIA or content that needs the plug-in. Some people would see this as a downfall, but I see it as a bonus because if you’re building applications for commercial distribution your code is not easily accessible. To develop with these technologies you use a XML-based markup language for presentation/design and an object-oriented programming language for coding. Another benefit is they don’t take long to pick up to learn as all you need to know is basic web-development skills!

These technologies that are available for RIA development are still in their ‘teens’ and still have a lot of growing up to do! Over the next couple of years we are going to see greater improvements in the technologies that build RIAs; including lighter frameworks, diverse interface components, easier development, easier deployment and cross-platform capability, which is already happening. Adobe released a runtime called AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) which is versatile and allows you to use Flex and Ajax to develop RIAs for the desktop; which is great as you can bring your website to a user’s desktop without massive alterations to your code!

Hopefully what this means is that it is going to cause web-developers to be more creative so they can get a user to use their application. You’re going to have to be first in, best dressed otherwise it will be extremely hard for you to turn a user over to your RIA. I quite like this idea actually as it means that we will hopefully start to see a lot more interesting and ground breaking RIAs! I guess we will just have to wait and see how it all pans out for Rich Internet Application development in the coming year.