Rich Internet Application (RIA) – this is the buzz word we hear quite often these days. Rich Internet Application which was coined by macromedia in 2002, was not very common till few years back, but with Web 2.0 boom RIA got a solid place in the web world.
So what is RIA
Earlier web was known as a one way communication system, where company use to showcase their details to end users. With the web 2.0 emergence, things totally changed. Web 2.0 gave the world wide web altogether a different persona. Where web was known to be a one way communication system, web 2.0 made it two way communication, where user was the king. Users can comment, rate, network, tag and so on and so forth.
Along with these flexibilities web 2.0 brought lot of new tools and technologies and concepts like Ajax, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex, SilverLight, Isomorphic SmartClient and so on. With all these concepts came a buzz of creating web applications with richness and that is where RIA comes into picture.
So what does ‘Rich’ means in Rich Internet Application?
Rich Internet Application are applications which combine the flexibility and responsiveness of a desktop application with broad reach of the web. RIA gives user the flexibility to use a web application with the features that of a desktop application.
What is the concept of ‘rich’ in Rich Internet Application ?
The concept of richness can divided into 2 parts
- Richness in User Interface
- Richness in Data model
Richness in User Interface
Rich Internet Application (RIA) offers a very rich set of user interface controls which can intelligently interact with data model. some of them are:
Drag and Drop control and Accordion control
Auto Complete control
Tree Grid control
Data Grid control and Data sorting control
Charting control
Calender control
Rich Text editor control
Inline editing control
Auto save control
Richness in Data model
Any website or application is incomplete without data, so having a rich data model to fetch or control these data is important. Richness in data model means
- Ability to send and receive data asynchronously
- Ability to obtain data from server without redrawing the entire page
- Efficiently utilizing network bandwidth transmitting only the portion of data that has been changed
- Support of sophisticated data models
Anatomy of RIA
Adobe in one of their presentation showcased RIA as follows
Benefit of Rich Internet Application
Rich Internet Application (RIA) brings in lot of benefits for the end users and well as developers and companies. Some of them are as follows:
For End Users
- Responsive and Interactive
- Real time communication
- Fast and easy to use
- Allow users to remotely monitor and manage data
- Allows quicker task completion
- Cross platform support
For Business
- Increased customer loyalty
- Increase in new customers
- Increased productivity
- longer site visits
- Reduced bandwidth and operational costs
For Developers
- Easy to learn
- Ease of development
RIA tools and technologies
The term Rich Internet Application(RIA) may be new, but the technologies which RIA uses is the combination of already existing technologies. Most commonly used RIA tools and technologies are:
RIA Technologies
- Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)
- XML
- JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
- Advanced JavaScript
UI Frameworks
- Adobe Flex
- Microsoft Silverlight
- Google Web toolkit (GWT)
- Isomorphic SmartClient
- Java server faces (JSF)
JavaScript Frameworks
- Yahoo UI (YUI)
- JQuery
- Prototype
- Scriptaculous
- Dojo Toolkit
- Mootools
Shyamala's Blog 