Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are just the beginning. A key trend taking place throughout the Web industry is the urgency to integrate disparate systems and software tools to reduce costs, increase developer productivity, reduce the need for manual processing and intervention in transactions, and decrease time to market. To achieve these objectives, organisations have endorsed the adoption of standards-based systems (e.g. XML, Design Patterns, CSS, ECMAScript) combined with the migration to Web Services and Service Orientated Architecture (SOA). This has led to a requirement to create a consistent and intuitive interface to applications, data and services. The immediate goal of these efforts is to provide simpler, quicker and more efficient access and processing of information. Increasingly, Web applications are also offering customers application interfaces that are more personalised and customised to each individual’s specific requests and requirements.

It is clear that RIAs offer the potential to fundamentally change the user experience and in doing so, yield significant business benefits. However, in order for RIAs to be widely employed, and for more companies to receive these kinds of returns, technologies to build RIAs will need to appeal to a wider range of developers. The ability to cost effectively create rich, engaging user experiences that support corporate objectives and reach a broader developer audience without sacrificing development productivity require a new generation of RIA tools. These tools are being developed by a large number of organisations with Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Sun leading the way with the AIR/Flash/Flex combination, Silverlight, Gears, Quicktime and JavaFX respectively.

The new generation of RIA tools being developed by the likes of Adobe and Microsoft must do the following to allow developers to truely harness the power of RIAs in the commercial environment:

1. Allow developers to write applications using familiar development models to utilise and extend their current skills without requiring them to adopt entirely new or different skills
2. Use standard and standards-based technologies
3. Use industry specific programming models and patterns
4. Use and/or leverage the existing IT infrastructure through wrap and reuse rather than rip and replace
5. Provide pervasive, familiar programming models and an expressive user interface across platforms and devices; and
6. Allow developers to create a solution that delivers scalable, secure, high performance solutions that are bandwidth efficient

These new RIA tools will need to provide the features that enhance IT developer’s abilities to be more creative and to accomplish RIA development with the same or less effort than the tools they use to create other types of applications. What is required are the tools that can help developers achieve these objectives without relying on only HTML or other scripting languages, or having to learn a completely new development approach.

Two vendors which have the technology and capaibility to fully deliver Rich Internet Applications are Adobe and Microsoft. With Microsoft’s Silverlight and XAML, developing rich internet applications to run on Windows platforms will progress at a fast rate. In turn, Adobe has had a head start with the aquisition of Macromedia and the subsequent addition of Flash and Flex to its product offering. Flash and its relative ubiquity across platforms and devices ensures that RIA development and production will be accessible to a large user base and as such puts Adobe at a distinct advantage over Microsoft.

The Internet has emerged from obscurity to become a dominant platform for application development and is integral to the idea of Software as a Service (SaaS). Unfortunately the demand to build applications of increasing complexity has continued to outpace the ability of traditional Web applications to represent that complexity and expectation. Utilisation of AJAX technologies attempts to reconcile some of the issues, but frequently the result is a frustrating, confusing or disengaging user experience resulting in unhappy customers, lost sales, and increased costs.

We are in a period of expanding opportunity for Internet and intranet applications. The growth in adoption and usage of the Internet has acted as a driver behind technology spending, spawned such terms as Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Web Services, and enterprise integration trends that seek to combine back-office infrastructures with new front-office applications and the Internet.

Integral to this is the need to communicate better with employees, customers, suppliers, and partners. Intranet applications, including enterprise information portals and employee facing applications, are increasingly depended upon to share information across a company, while outwardly focused extranet applications seek to more tightly bind networks of partners, suppliers and customers and make communication, business transactions and support easier.

A key reason Web applications cannot represent these types of complexity is because of the limitations of HTML pages. The Internet grew up on the notion of a network of loosely coupled, unintelligent clients that communicate with increasingly intelligent servers by sending requests for pages. The emergence of Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) has served to blur the distinction between the desktop and the Web and has resulted in smart, powerful and dynamic user interfaces. RIA’s seek to combine the best of the desktop, Web and communication technologies.

As one would expect, the driving forces behind Rich Internet Applications are the big guns in the technology and Web industry; namely Adobe, Google and Microsoft. Each company has produced their own RIA platforms:

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.

Applications can be built using the following technologies:

• Flash / Flex / ActionScript
• HTML / JavaScript / CSS / AJAX
• Combination of these technologies
• PDF can be leveraged with any application

Adobe Integrated Runtime can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/

Google Gears

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

Google Gears consists of three modules that address the core challenges in making web applications work offline.

• LocalServer Cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) locally
• Database Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• WorkerPool Make your web applications more responsive by performing resource-intensive operations asynchronously

Google Gears can be found at http://gears.google.com

Micrsoft Silverlight

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.

Microsoft Silverlight can be found at http://silverlight.net

Web 2.0 will alter the way that businesses develop and apply innovative ideas.

During the 1990s business leaders and venture capitalists grappled with how they would make money from the web. This was tipified by the two VCs, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital, investing $25 million in Google in the late 1990s; they new the search engine created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page was a winning formula, even though the pair had not yet monetised search. Bricks and mortar compaines were deemed “old hat” as the dotcom bubble was expanding. Companies such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo! were at the forefront of every investors’ chequebook. Every company needed a 21st Century “Blue Sky” web strategy; every company needed to do e-commerce. However, the bubble burst and everyone was brought down with a bang. Boo.com is a classic example of the fallout from the over speculation.

Today, the reality has shifted from solely bricks and mortar or dotcom, to a balance between the real world and cyberspace, of traditional business operations complemented by the unversality provided by web-based technologies. The web has given businesses a greater understanding of their customers. With Web 2.0 a new type of web is emerging, further enhancing the understanding of a user or customer through the creation of online communities, where information is shared and new ideas evolve.

There are numerous examples of web communities from the early FriendsReunited to MySpace and the more specific Islandoo for the Channel4 TV progamme Shipwrecked. Web 2.0 is all about collaborative networks tipified by Flickr, del.icio.us, Wikipedia and YouTube. However, Web 2.0 has primarily been used in the consumer arena, as identified by the examples, but the use of such technologies has far reaching implications based on understanding how people interact with the technologies and behave online. Linking people across countries, time-zones and company boundaries will enable people to work together without hierarchical boundaries, bringing people together as one team to collate the best input. This is emphasised with the concept of a wiki whereby any end-user can make changes to the shared resource without the need for specialist software and expensive training. This makes sharing knowledge extremely easy.

Other areas of Web 2.0 is the technology identified by the term “folksonomy”. Simply, a folksonomy is defined on Wikipedia as:

… an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content such as Web pages, online photographs, and Web links. A folksonomy is most notably contrasted from a taxonomy in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the labels are applied. The labels are commonly known as tags and the labeling process is called tagging.

While it takes time for an expert to create a taxonomy specific to a particular organisation in order to categorise or define data, folksonomies do not require fixed taxonomies. Instead, users define their own descriptions of the data to be described by applying tags to the data, whether it is a bookmark in terms of del.icio.us, an image on Flickr, a video on YouTube or a document in a company repository. Over time, these tags can be amended by other users resulting in a definition that is more specific. This enables users to find information with relative ease, without having to type the exact keyword.

Web 2.0 will bring a whole host of issues into the business arena. While there are clear benefits from establishing communities and social networks, people with different views, be it political or religious, can drive the agenda. Further complications arise through the necessity to audit changes to the data and ensuring the data is indeed accurate (Wikipedia has had cases where people have maliciously altered data to either enhance their own profile or devalue the significance of historical events).