Mrinal Wadhwa is a software developer form Bangalore, India. His interests include Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Software. These days he's working with a small team trying to bootstrap a software as a service product startup
While working on a project yesterday I needed to convert several vectors (hundreds of them) into reusable Flex 4 visual elements that I could then use in my skins, so lets say if I have vectors of chess pieces that I would like to use in my Skin as follows …
Since I needed these in several skin files I did not want to deal with clunky Path elements which would’ve looked something like this..
So I created a quick AIR application …. read more
Adobe AIR is a extraordinary platform and the core idea behind AIR i.e enabling web developers to build desktop apps has been revolutionary. But, there are things about AIR that are very limiting as a developer … many real world applications need much more interaction with the desktop than AIR allows, yes Adobe has valid security related reasons not to allow this but once users allow you to install an application on their desktop they expect features that AIR doesn’t allow you to implement … not being able to do trivial things like .. launch a file in its default application or register a global keyboard shortcut is sometimes frustrating and has led to developers putting together things like The Merapi Project .. which quite frankly is a hack to work around the core problem .. inextensibility of AIR as a platform.
I’ll be at Adobe Flash Ahead tomorrow. If you’re in Bangalore and not planning to attend this event you should .. the event will showcase the finalist’s of Adobe RIAthon and the cool applications they built…
The event will also have interesting presentations on some of the latest advancements in the Flash platform .. some of the highlights include … read more
After a lot of convincing, Abesh got me to start writing at SAP Network Blogs … as part of my introductory post I ended up describing what I thought the term RIA meant and I later realized I had never documented my interpretation of Rich Internet Applications so here’s what I said in the SDN post ..
What are Rich Internet Applications? .. while there are many definitions on the web, I like to decide if something is an RIA or not based on the following criteria …
- It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
- Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
- It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.
If a piece of software satisfies the above criteria, in my opinion, its an RIA. If you think about these points for a little bit, you’ll quickly realize that, even though a fairly new buzzword, is not a new concept …. Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo Messenger, Gmail etc are all RIAs that came out several years ago. After some more thought, you’ll realize that in today’s context majority of applications that we build have something to do with data that lives elsewhere on the network, therefore the dominant factor that defines an RIA is the richness of the experience users have while using it. So if we oversimplify, RIAs are applications built with special attention to user interface and user experience.
Many modern interface development technologies have been labeled as Rich Internet Application Technologies .. these include AJAX, various Javascript libraries and frameworks, modern browsers, Gears, Flex, Flash Player, AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX etc .. while these technologies facilitate building an RIA it does not automatically imply that everything built with them is an RIA … in fact, it is very easy to build a Not So Rich Internet Application with these so called RIA technologies. At the same time, it is important to note that the use of these technologies is not a prerequisite to building an RIA either.
This is how I understand Rich Internet Applications .. what is your interpretation of the term RIA?
I’ve been building applications for Adobe AIR since its very first public alpha and I totally love it, its a brilliant platform that opens up several unexplored possibilities by allowing web developers to extend the reach of their applications to their users’ desktops. One aspect of AIR applications that is not talked about enough though is Security.
AIR applications are installed on your desktop and have access to your file system and the Internet at the same time, and this can be a dangerous combo. There are several measures taken by the AIR runtime to ensure the security of your information, you can read more about them here, but all in all, just like any other desktop application, you are trusting the creator of the AIR application to be true to his word and not do bad things with your data …. read more
