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MVI has pioneered the development of Rich Internet Applications utilization on the web we believe that this area will continue to grow and become a prominent portion of our business.
Rich Internet applications (RIA) are Web applications that offer better features and functionality. RIAs typically transfer the processing to the Web client but keep the data back on the server. A rich Internet application (RIA) is an entirely new kind of web experience that is engaging, interactive, lightweight, and flexible. RIAs offer the flexibility and ease of use and add finctionality only offer thru traditional web applications. The tools that the industry uses to build and deploy RIAs thru major data container formats in such areas as graphics (JPEG, TIF, GIF, PNG, etc), rich media (Flash SWF, SVG, ViewPoint MTS, etc), e-business and publishing (RSS, a wide range of EDI, etc), desktop office data (Adobe PDF, Open Office, Microsoft Office 2003) and hundreds of others are being published as open APIs. Many are based on XML. All major RIA-Rich Internet Application development systems have embraced XML and data interoperability standards as a key enabler of their architectures.
Adobe Flex™ 2, and AJAX enables enterprises to create personalized, multimedia-rich applications that dramatically enhance user experience, increasing customer satisfaction and making users experience more productive. In Internet development, the RIA sector is one of significant growth. MVI, a leading web development company, predicts that the RIA usage will grow to become a $2 billion market by 2010
RIA is designed to combine the full "content rich" experience of a desktop application with the "broad reach" of a website, RIA's deliver the best of both worlds. Originally coined by Macromedia in a 2002 white paper, RIA's have since grown into a widely accepted technology and are now the direction of choice for many new web development projects. According to MVI Research, nearly 65 percent of all new application development will include RIA technology by 2010. As clients consider their options in the web development sector and consider adopting RIA's, it's important to understand both the value they deliver and the challenges they can introduce. RIA technology is still in the early adopter stages, but the long-term business applications of this technology are huge. RIA's ability to enrich the customer experience while supporting more complex services and transactions makes it a strong differentiator for clients.
MVI will present the concept of RIA's and explain why clients should be embracing this new technology. It will also provide examples of how RIA technology has been implemented wisely to address specific business needs and will present a foundation of what you need to know to kick start RIA projects with clients
RIA's typically:
- run in a Web browser, or do not require software installation
run locally in a secure environment called a sandbox
Benefits, because RIA's employ a client engine to interact with the user, they are:
- They can offer user-interface behaviors not obtainable using only the HTML widgets available to standard browser-based Web applications. This richer functionality may include anything that can be implemented in the technology being used on the client side, including drag and drop, using a slider to change data, calculations performed only by the client and which do not need to be sent back to the server, for example, a mortgage calculator.
- The interface behaviors are typically much more responsive than those of a standard Web browser that must always interact with a remote server.
The most sophisticated examples of RIA's exhibit a look and feel approaching that of a desktop environment. Using a client engine can also produce other performance benefits:
- The demand for client and server computing resources is better balanced, so that the Web server need not be the workhorse that it is with a traditional Web application. This frees server resources, allowing the same server hardware to handle more client sessions concurrently.
- The client engine can interact with the server asynchronously -- that is, without waiting for the user to perform an interface action like clicking on a button or link. This option allows RIA designers to move data between the client and the server without making the user wait. Perhaps the most common application of this is perfecting, in which an application anticipates a future need for certain data, and downloads it to the client before the user requests it, thereby speeding up a subsequent response. Google Maps uses this technique to move adjacent map segments to the client before the user scrolls their view.
- The network traffic may also be significantly reduced because an application-specific client engine can be more intelligent than a standard Web browser when deciding what data needs to be exchanged with servers. This can speed up individual requests or responses because less data is being transferred for each interaction, and overall network load is reduced. However, use of asynchronous perfecting techniques can neutralize or even reverse this potential benefit. Because the code cannot anticipate exactly what every user will do next, it is common for such techniques to download extra data, not all of which is actually needed, to many or all clients.
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