The Evolution of RIA
Web application has its own advantages over the age old Client Server Applications, and thus large enterprises adopted it as their prime choice whenever they tend to develop a new applications. And not only new application but stared to migrate their existing client server based enterprise application to web based application. HTTP the base layer has not been changed a lot to cope up with the enterprise user’s expectations.
Gradually form based applications started facing problems in meeting the user’s expectation and responsiveness of the applications started coming up as major issues. Usability of an application came up strongly and XML-RPC became popular in large enterprise applications and been there for long time to meet the user expectations to some extends.
Macromedia FLASH and the new technology called FLASH-Remoting, opened up new possibilities of Rich User Interface in thin clients. Enterprise App builders started thinking of various possibilities of using Rich User Interfaces in their Enterprise App. And java space tried to play their age old SWING card in various ways but unfortunately SWING was unable to gain the momentum. But developer community started thinking of Rich UI using SVG, SWING etc. but in a different approach, because till then enterprise builders have realized that MVC actually unable to separate the VIEW layer as they expected. Thus XUL has arrived in the scene. Still some declarative swing application project (XUL based) are still live in SF.
But thin client limitation was still a hitch for UI. Google came up with age old technique of MSDN on demand tree menu loading in a new package (Google Suggestion) and developer community acted promptly and AJAX was suddenly became the most HYPED buzzword in the developer community. But Macromedia has come up with XUL based (MXML) RIA development framework FLEX. Beta was a huge hit among the designer community but unable to attract the developer community because of the lack of support of PHP the most popular scripting language of WEB development. They come up with FLEX 1.5 with limited support of SOA which some how managed get the attention of the developer community. But designer community was thrilled because of the introduction of eclipse based IDE for designing FLASH web sites in hours. Laszlo open sourced their Laszlo systems(Flex counterpart) and RIA became hit. Yahoo joined the RIA party and developer and designer community join the party. CSS gained the momentum as well and join hands with the developers because of AJAX. Standard based web development became a popular practice and gave platform to shout for the designers and to establish a new term of WEB-Architect which is becoming poplar day by day.
As RIA became popular and lot of new Ajax oriented toolkit has came up, like dojo, DWR, Sajax Django etc. Lot of tag-libraries for java space has also come up like ajaxanywhre, ajaxtags etc.
In my next post I will try to convey the problems of RIA and Ajax implementations and some resources.