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 …

1. It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
2. Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
3. 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?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does FlexBuilder generate css styles as “styleName” but suggests auto completions as “style-name” ?

Generated Style

 

Auto-Complete

 

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UPDATE: If you find this behaviour annoying, please vote on this Flash Builder bug
 

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Raghu has announced on his blog that Adobe will give out free Flex Builder licenses to everyone who attends their upcoming Flex Developer event in Bangalore. The dates of the event are still being decided, so if you want to stay informed signup on Raghu’s little flex app … he promises not to spam but trust him at your own risk

I’ve been very vocal in the past about the problems Adobe needs to address to help the Flex community grow in India and one of my biggest concerns has been the problems relating to buying Flex Builder in India. Although, those problems still stand, I appreciate Adobe’s efforts to tackle them in whatever way they can. I hope they’ll enable an online store in India soon, but until then I appreciate Adobe for trying to provide new developers all the means that they need to get started with Flex development.

A special thanks to the Adobe Evangelism team in India, who I know have worked really hard towards making all this possible.

See you all at the event.

Thomas Jung over at SAP Developer Network has posted the details of a workshop he will be leading along with Rich Heilman, Dan McWeeney and Ed Herrmann at the SDN Community Day in Las Vagas.

The workshop is aimed at educating developers about the new UI features in the new version of Web Dynpro (SAP’s UI development technology) available in Netweaver 7.0 Enhancement Pack 1, Thomas also posted the below video that shows a preview of these new features that they will be discussing in the workshop.

All the new enhancements are exiting, but what really got me charged up was the feature called Flash Islands (mentioned around the 6th minute of the video), In summary, Web Dynpro now allows you to embed Flash/Flex components within Web Dynpro Interfaces and there is seamless integration, Web dynpro elements can communicate with Flash and Flash elements can communicate back with Web dynpro … this has 2 very exciting implications …

• Web Dynpro is a closed framework and till now could not have customized controls, now it can have any kind of UI components you can think of with Flex
• More importantly, this can totally change the face of enterprise interfaces, imagine highly interactive engaging UIs, innovative data visualizations, video etc. etc.

So dare I call this Enterprise UI 2.0 .. yeah I know 2.0 is such a cliche these days .. but this stuff is exciting.

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