RIA: Good, but it’s not the new Duct Tape
Push Technology. Channel Definition Format. Marimba. Castanet. WAP. And on and on and on.
Every few years, someone comes out with a new spin on a questionable idea and pushes it as innovative and necessary to the marketing and sales units of our firms. Was there anything actually wrong with Push Technology or Channels? No, there was a use for them in some narrow range of applications, but it was pretty dumb to try to convert every web site in the world to push content to your desktop.
We are all tired of the hassles of crappy, slow, confusing UIs which take forever to load and run. We understand that a more usable product is a more successful one, and we are constantly looking to improve our products. This I’m calling a good thing.
Enter AJAX and GWT: Excellent solution to these problems, and hey–doesn’t even require any funky plug-ins. Just a fairly decent browser and some RAM, and you should be fine.
There were still some who didn’t (and don’t) believe that AJAX follows our sacred design principles, so the RIA came along to speak to both concerns. RIA promises any developer who can write XML can now end up with spectacular graphics, animations, dynamic pie charts, multimedia presentations–which would all look the same on every OS that supports Flash and in any browser.
On top of that, we are given access to our web services and even a scripting API (not quite JavaScript, but not too hard to learn either). Nevermind that this new client acts as both the View and the Controller, someone will come out with new design patterns to address RIA soon, and then you can wear your GoF pajamas to bed again.
Of course it’s not just Adobe: you’ve got your choice between OpenLaszlo or Flex, and both are pretty good. Hell, Laszlo Legals (beta currently) even lets you build your RIA in DHTML if you don’t want to require Flash.
Here are some web applications which I see as strong candidates for RIA:
1) Car Configurator: Like where you pick out your color, options, style, and so on. No need to keep hitting the server, most of that you can just pre-load in the client and use the proprietary scripting API for figuring out prices and processing rules. This also applies to any configurator, such as Dell’s computer configurator which happens to be in sore need of some UI help.
2) Webinar: Instead of using applets, you can do this in Flash where it’s like a moderated video chat room.
3) Financial Reporting: That software that builds real-time pie charts showing you your portfolio composition graphically.
It would be dumb to replace things like Google, The Server Side or SlashDot (not to mention a billion others) with this just for the sake of doing so. These things have their place, and I hope people don’t just start trying to convert the world into RIA.
