Tuesday October 27th, 2009. So I was curious to see how my website was doing in Google search results, so I typed in “RIA Seattle” within the lonely text box of that search engine. Though my website was nowhere to be seen in any immediate results (I’ll have to work some more on my metadata and SEO), I did find an interesting link for the Adobe Roadshow. The roadshow was to be held in Seattle the very next day from when I conducted my search. RIA of course stands for Rich Internet Applications and it is a relatively new technology where companies and organizations are developing “in the cloud” to better harness the rich capabilities of the internet such as video, photos, SMS, GPS and phone for the enhancement of their websites and intranet applications.



I find this technology fascinating! For the past few months I’ve been building my own RIA’s through Adobe Flex Builder 3. Considering that the Adobe Roadshow was free to attend, I thought that this would be a great opportunity to go and see what Adobe is currently working on for their next wave of development tools for passionate web developers, such as myself. So I registered, and the next day I arrived in Fremont Seattle to the Adobe company compound, a nice mix of old town charm and modern day business. This is an area of the city I had not experienced before then.

The Adobe Roadshow was a presentation of their tools such as Adobe FlashBuilder (formerly Flex Builder), LiveCycle, and Adobe AIR. This presentation was not only a display of powerful development tools, but also a series of case studies on how high profile companies are using these tools to improve their business processes and web presence. So as I sat there to take it all in, I was amazed to learn of all the ways this Adobe suite of tools was not only making companies web sites more impressive, but also dramatically improving their company workflows to streamline former business bottleneck areas.

Here are a couple of examples where companies around the world are working with Adobe RIA tools:

• A county in Illinois has used Adobe LiveCycle ES to automate their workflow process of incorporating electronic signatures into their bundle of forms associated with court cases.

• A major financial company has used Adobe AIR for document assembly, distribution, and archiving. Also within this system there is end-to-end tracking of the documents for process improvement and compliance.

• One of largest consumer products companies has used these Adobe tools to solve their issues with SAFE (Signatures and Authentication for Everyone) digital signature standards. This allowed the company to develop a program to streamline managing, reviewing, and approving the large volume of documents associated with pertinent signatures.

• And my favorite example, and I will get more into this in another discussion, is the large built-in support Adobe Flex/Flash Builder has for the Salesforce.com CRM.

So overall it was a very impressive demonstration of impressive tools. Frankly I thought the demonstration of the capabilities of these tools was overwhelming, and that is a very good thing. Because as you take on the learning challenge of a new tool or suite of tools, you want to be sure that the sky is the limit and that your investment in time, brain space, and capital will not be soon superseded.

I think that Adobe has begun to take development to the next level.

The RIA space is hot right now, and contenders are standing in their respective corners of the ring. In one corner, you have the front-runner, Flex by Adobe; and in another corner is the top contender, Silverlight by Microsoft. Sun is also trying to capture a piece of the prize with the new kid on the block, JavaFX.

Here’s a brief summary of the major RIA contenders.

Flex by Adobe

First out of the blocks, Adobe has maintained a fierce pace in expanding this platform. With Flex 3, Adobe made the framework open source; the software development kit (SDK) has been free since Flex 2, and the price point for the optional IDE is attractive.

Flex has the following things going for it:

• It leverages the nearly ubiquitous Flash Player, which has a 98% penetration level (trying to find a computer that doesn’t have Flash is very challenging).
• The huge Flash community and its knowledge.
• Tight integration with other Adobe products from designer (Photoshop, Fireworks, and so on), to developer, to server (ColdFusion, media streaming, and so forth).
• A four year head start.
• Open source framework.
• Free SDK

On the downside:

• Although Flex’s printing abilities are satisfactory, there is a lot of room for improvement (particularly with respect to report-style printing).
• Because the technology is still relatively new, the size of the community (an estimated 150,000 developers) is relatively small compared to .NET and Java.
• RIA applications are launched from a browser plug-in, so the application exists within the instance of that plug-in. This means pop-up windows aren’t able to exist outside of the window in which the main Flex application is located. Although Flex offers ways around this limitation (using third party tools) it is not native to the platform.

Silverlight by Microsoft

Microsoft isn’t well known for being an early innovator, seemingly preferring to invest enormous amounts of capital to dominate only after others have invented market spaces.

Silverlight doesn’t yet have a spectrum of supporting products. But from the design perspective, Microsoft has a product called Expression Studio; from the platform perspective, it has some of the bases covered by supporting Windows and Apple Oss, as well as browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Microsoft is moving quickly with Silverlight 1.0, which was released in September 2007 (2.0 is already in beta). Version 2.0 continues to focus on fundamentals, which are features such as layout and data service components that Flex has incorporated since its earliest versions.

Adobe recognizes that an end to end systems development lifecycle exists. The life of a Flex application doesn’t necessarily start when the Flex developer starts coding – it starts with the designers and the folks on user experience teams who are mocking up the experience from its inception by suing tools such as Fireworks, Photoshop, and Flash. The workflow is seamless; each type of user can work within his realm and collaborate easily with whoever is next in line both upstream and downstream.

The biggest thing that Silverlight has going for it is that users are able to leverage the existing .NET framework, components, and language. This will be a natural draw to those who are already in that development camp.

JavaFX by Sun Microsystems

At this time, JavaFX amounts to nothing more than an announcement.

If we were to speculate, we’d need to look back into Sun’s history to postulate what to expect. For a company that generates $13 billion in revenue per year, it is well known for only two things: Java and its servers.

Sun had the opportunity to be the RIA leader with Java but failed to capitalize on it, rendering JavaFX pretty much a second attempt. Sun is also engaged in a strategic partnership with Laszlo Systems, which may help the company catch up.

Sun is a company that creates technologies for technologists, who in turn make solutions for technologists. The company’s vision and spectrum are specific, focusing less on the average user as part of usability case story.

Existing tools from Sun are functional and utilitarian and assume a certain level of subject matter expertise. Creativity and design are definitely not Sun’s strengths. In order for the company to succeed, it will need to take measures to compensate for its weaknesses. For example, having strong support for integration with the top tools in each industry—such as Photoshop for design – will get Sun past some early adoption hurdles.

Sun’s biggest advantage will be the sheer size of the Java development community with users who tend to be loyal to their platform.

Sun’s biggest mistake would be to copy what Flex and Silverlight can do without offering any unique advantages or capabilities, thus relegating itself to being a “metoo” technology.


Source: Flex3 In Action, Tariq Ahmed with Jon Hirschi and Faisal Abid, 2009 Manning Publications.

[Submitted by Reppin505]

Rich Internet Applications have a rightful place in areas of the internet where flashy content is most needed, but with their now seemingly limitless potential, what can we expect from the near future?

One of the more popular up and coming sites is MSN's Wonderwall. This website incorporates inovative flash technology with on demand content management. I was amazed the first time i saw it, and it has set the bar for what consumers are now going to expect when looking for celebrity news and gossip.

Take a look at it here.

Have you seen any cool RIA's?