October 24, 2008
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?
September 26, 2008
Microsoft just released Silverlight 2 RC0, which is a development release to help developers prepare their apps for Silverlight 2. They’ve not released an end-user runtime for this version since the release candidate is targeted at helping developers prepare their Silverlight 2 Beta 2 apps for the Silverlight 2 release. You can get the developer runtime and updates for Visual Studio Silverlight tools and Expression Blend here.
Looks like they moved around lot of stuff, so there are several breaking changes. You can download a detailed document about the changes here. Mike Snow also has a detailed post describing the changes.
June 27, 2008
Google Gears is a very interesting platform. It’s a browser plugin that is aimed at extending the abilities of web browsers to satiate the needs of modern day rich web applications. The Gears website defines it as follows ..
Gears is an open source project that enables more powerful web applications, by adding new features to your web browser:
- Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
- Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
Gears today provides some very interesting features like a WorkerPool module to run JavaScript code in the background, without blocking the main page’s script execution, a LocalServer module that allows a web application to cache and serve its HTTP resources locally without a network connection, a Database module that provides browser-local relational data storage, a Desktop module that allows you to create desktop shortcuts for your web applications and more.
There are some very interesting features in the works as well like Desktop Notifications from browser apps, Multiple file select, resuming uploads, geolocation support etc.
All the above features have the potential of drastically changing the experience users have when using applications in the browser and that excites me 
Many of these features can be very useful for applications that run in other plugins like Flash Player or Silverlight Player as well… read more
June 3, 2008
Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb twittered this a little bit ago …
oh shit, Silverlight gets pushed out through Windows Update? hah, oops. hmmm
In reply to which Shannon Clark twittered ..
@marshallk To give Microsoft credit Silverlight is listed as an optional update so not just randomly installed
I don’t have Windows so cannot confirm this, but if this true I don’t like it .. even if its optional, its not fair play. This combined with the HP + Silverlight news, makes me feel a little gagged as a user.
How do you feel about this?
May 24, 2008
NYTimes has released a Mac OS version of their desktop application Times Reader, so I decided to install it and here’s what I saw …
WO ! .. Silverlight for a desktop application? .. I continue installing and get it running and to my surprise it does in fact use Silverlight …
You can read a detailed description of the Application here on The New York Times blog, this is what they say about the technology used ..
Times Reader for the Mac is a native Cocoa application, which uses the Safari toolkit and Silverlight to render the pages.
Now this is not a new approach in the Flash world, but I think this is the first time it has been done with Silverlight.
In the process the guys at NYTimes were able to create a framework that does a lot of what AIR does .. native window, file read write, same code for web app and desktop app etc etc. This is very intriguing because if Microsoft decides to build upon this approach they could come with an equivalent of AIR that can run Silverlight based desktop applications across platforms. Of course, they do not need something like this for Windows since conceptually a Silverlight app could be compiled to run on Windows desktops, but this could be an interesting approach for them to take on other platforms. What do you think?
