The diverse nature of enterprise application requirements,
combined with the clear strengths and weaknesses of different RIA
technologies, lead to the inevitable conclusion that "one size does not
fit all."
No single RIA development approach is ideal for all enterprise
environments. Some requirements are better met by scripting-based RIA
approaches, while others require OOP. And in these two categories, a
particular application need will be better served by AJAX versus Flash,
or by Java versus .NET. In short, all four of these RIA technologies
are likely to co-exist in many enterprise environments for the near
future.
Interesting New Developments All RIA solutions are
fundamentally constrained by their underlying technology - AJAX, Flash,
Java, or .NET. If a developer picks Flex to develop his RIA, he has to
live with the pros as well as cons of Flash. Likewise, if a developer
picks an AJAX toolkit to develop his RIA, she must live with the
various challenges associated with DHTML and JavaScript. As we
mentioned earlier, among the four technologies, each has its strengths
and weaknesses. One of the major goals of enterprise IT departments is
"common flexibility" - providing standardization and simplification
across different business applications and initiatives, while enabling
flexibility for innovation within business units. Different business
units have different programmer skills and therefore need different
types of applications. As a result, dictating the use of one RIA
technology across a large organization is unlikely to work well.
There's been a very interesting development in the RIA marketplace
recently: cross-technology RIA solutions. Both Laszlo Systems and
Nexaweb recently announced that their products are supporting more than
one technology so that the same application can be delivered and
rendered on different technology platforms. Laszlo supports both Flash
and AJAX (DHTML). Nexaweb supports Java and AJAX. With this
development, developers don't have to fight the "religious war" of
JavaScript versus Java, Java versus .NET, or .NET versus Flash. Such
development accommodates not only different developer skill sets, but
also opens the door to combining the benefits of scripting-based
approaches with those of OOP-based approaches, delivering optimal
results.
Listing 2 is a sample application written using a cross-technology RIA
solution. It is an RSS reader that would read RSS feeds from Yahoo and
display all the feeds in a table. The code is Listing 2 and the UI
screen display is shown in Figure 8.
Enterprise RIA Adoption Today Though still in an
evolutionary stage, RIAs have been adopted and proven at many leading
organizations over the world. Many companies have adopted RIAs as the
foundation for their business applications and achieved great success.
How broadly have RIAs been adopted? Though there are no
industry-recognized statistics available, numbers from RIA solution
vendors provide some insight. For example, Adobe claims that Flex has
about 300 customers. Nexaweb claims that its platform has been deployed
to over 4,000 enterprises.
It is also meaningful to look at which industries are adopting RIA.
According to a market study done by Nexaweb in October 2005, RIA
adoption spans a wide range of industries, with no single one
dominating. Financial services leads with a 17% share, followed closely
by healthcare, hospitability, and consumer products. (See Figure 9)
From an application profile perspective, companies adopt RIA solutions
for many different kinds of applications, including internal IT
applications, B2B applications, B2C applications, and B2C Web sites.
According to the same Nexaweb research, 48% of the RIAs deployed today
are enterprise business applications, either B2B or internal, while 45%
of them are deployed as consumer applications. (See Figure 10)
Conclusion To leverage the Internet for
competitive advantage and lower operating costs, businesses need RIA
solutions to overcome the inherent limitations of the Web as a platform
for developing, deploying, and maintaining business applications.
There are different approaches based on Java,
.NET, AJAX, and Flash for RIA solutions, and each approach has its
strengths and weaknesses. Given the diverse application requirements in
enterprise environments, no single approach will be able to span all
enterprise environments. In the end, all four approaches will co-exist
serving different application requirements.
Though different RIA solutions may be based on different technology
approaches, the programming model centered on a declarative UI is
common. The real differentiator is application logic development, which
is determined by the RIA approach used by the chosen RIA solution. In
the end, the application logic development determines application
maintenance and scalability.
Cross-technology RIA solutions are exciting new developments. Such
solutions should enable enterprises to adopt a common model and
framework to meet different application requirements, while still
enabling innovation and accommodating different developer skill sets.
Though relatively young, enterprise RIA solutions have already been
adopted by many companies in many different industries led by the
financial services. As RIA solutions are further developed, RIA
adoption in enterprise environments will continue to grow.
Resources
M. Driver, R. Valdes, and G. Phifer. "Rich Internet
Applications Are the Next Evolution of the Web." Gartner Research Note.
G00126924. May 4, 2005.
About Coach Wei Coach Wei is the Founder and Chairman of Nexaweb (www.nexaweb.com), developers of the leading software platform for building and deploying Web 2.0 and AJAX applications. Previously, he played a key role at EMC Corporation in the development of a new generation of storage network management software. Wei has his master's degree from MIT, holds several patents, is the author of several technology publications including JDJ, Web 2.0 Journal, and AJAXWorld Magazine, and is an industry advocate for the proliferation of open standards.
Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
#5
j j commented on 19 Sep 2006
Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
#4
j j commented on 19 Sep 2006
Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
#3
AJAX SUX commented on 27 Aug 2006
AJAX SUX.
Javascript is the number 1 culprit of popup ads, browser hijackers, virus infectors, pop unders, browser crashes, hangs, gaudy annoying banner advertisements, flashing blinking ad-rotators, dumb rollover buttons, forms that don't work, ONLOAD crap, window resizers, dorky little mouse pointer trails that look like little bouncing balls following your little mousie all around like a junior high school myspace page caliber web programmer, stupid little purple scrollbars, incompatible browsers, exploit hooks, automatic download links that don't work, etc etc.
In fact, there is now a world wide movement to get RID OF JAVASCRIPT. Javascript is on its way out. People are already annoyed with it and are boycotting sites and advertisers that use Javascript and they are preferring sites that use normal standard HTML.
any websites that continute to use Javascript are dumped and nobody visits them and those companies using gratuitous and unnecessary Javascript on their sites are blacklisted. Form buttons, form validators, anything. Any programmer using Javascript = Loser.
#2
Greg Holmberg commented on 1 Aug 2006
As usual, Wei conveniently leaves off the list one of the best designed and most efficient solutions in the Java-based category: UltraLightClient from Canoo.
The server-side API is almost identical to the Swing API, the network protocol is highly optimized and puts just 1/10th the data on the network as HTML, and there is a plug-in to Eclipse for GUI building.
#1
JDJ News Desk commented on 28 Jul 2006
Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
n d wrote: Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
j j wrote: Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
j j wrote: Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
AJAX SUX wrote: AJAX SUX.
Javascript is the number 1 culprit of popup ads, browser hijackers, virus infectors, pop unders, browser crashes, hangs, gaudy annoying banner advertisements, flashing blinking ad-rotators, dumb rollover buttons, forms that don't work, ONLOAD crap, window resizers, dorky little mouse pointer trails that look like little bouncing balls following your little mousie all around like a junior high school myspace page caliber web programmer, stupid little purple scrollbars, incompatible browsers, exploit hooks, automatic download links that don't work, etc etc.
In fact, there is now a world wide movement to get RID OF JAVASCRIPT. Javascript is on its way out. People are already annoyed with it and are boycotting sites and advertisers that use Javascript and they are preferring sites that use normal standard HTML.
any websites that continute to use Javascript are dumped and no...
Greg Holmberg wrote: As usual, Wei conveniently leaves off the list one of the best designed and most efficient solutions in the Java-based category: UltraLightClient from Canoo.
http://www.canoo.com/ulc
The server-side API is almost identical to the Swing API, the network protocol is highly optimized and puts just 1/10th the data on the network as HTML, and there is a plug-in to Eclipse for GUI building.
JDJ News Desk wrote: Enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the next evolution of business application development. There are four different approaches to RIA development - AJAX, Java, Flash, and .NET - and many different RIA solutions available today. This article answers the following questions: What are enterprise RIAs? Which approach should you use? Which solutions are appropriate for you? And how are RIAs being adopted today?
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CloudBench Applications, Inc. announced its financial results for the three months and nine months ending September 30, 2009. All amounts are stated in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted. Revenues from BasicGov, the Company's cloud computing solution for local government, gr...
The new contract is an industry first, with CSC being the first Microsoft partner to lead and win a cloud computing services agreement of this scale. Under terms of the contract, CSC will provide Royal Mail Group's 30,000 employees with access to new IT services using Microsoft's...
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