RIA: Is It déjà vu All Over Again?

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are becoming more popular. What slight improvement of usability by getting data in the background (AJAX) is moving onward to making Web UIs more complex and advanced.

Advanced or Rich Web UI brings a whole horde of challenges. For example, if you work with AJAX you make a lot of (small) round trips for the server which on a large application can cause network and latency problems. So we get COMET -- but again that is already old news since we already solved this problem in client/server ages ago.

I guess the root cause for going with Web technologies was really a deployment problem -- but what we (that is, the software industry) did was throw out the baby with the bathwater. But not all is lost. We are starting to see Rich clients in disguise with technologies like Adobe Flex 2 (also see Flex 2 and Rich Internet Apps) and WPF/E (or WPF Interoperability), which are dubbed "Web technologies" because they run in the browser but download to the client when accessed.

Posted by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz at 08:30 AM  Permalink