Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Alongside the ascendancy of the World Wide Web (WWW) as global information platform, its technology has increasingly been employed as the basis for enterprise applications in the course of the last 10 years. Web based application have successively squeezed out the previously widespread client-server applications. Ever more IT managers have recognised the operational advantages of centralised application management (re-)enabled through this technology and have placed a total emphasis upon HTML in their application development. This trend has rather conveyed the impression in recent years, therefore, that page based user interfaces were the last word, while user-oriented layout and design appeared consigned to oblivion.

In the wake of the euphoria surrounding HTML there were always organisations who expressed their dissatisfaction at the shortcomings of pure HTML interfaces. Meanwhile, a significant number of middle sized IT companies made their money developing RIAs for such organisations. Publicly, however, these efforts scarcely attracted attention. It was not until the Eclipse project, with its popular Rich Client Platform (RCP)[1] several years ago, that the ordinary developer was once again reminded of the far more ergonomic interfaces of the client-server technology of the 1980s and 1990s.

The term “rich client” now became newly synonymous with this technology.  Since RCP is a “fat client” technology it did not correspond to the centralised “zero footprint”[2] approach of classical HTML applications. These benefits, in which no application specific code whatsoever was of installed on the client, thus employed so called “rich thin client” technology, which in turn however merely represented a transient niche. It was not until Jesse James Garrett coined the phrase “Ajax”[3] in 2005, thus bestowing respectability on JavaScript based Internet technology that the idea of “Rich Internet Applications” became familiar to a broader public, who has since been demanding the same level of interface interactivity in online connections as that of pure desktop applications.

This trend has been reinforced to now by discussions about the fuzzy, yet enigmatic term “Web 2.0”[4]. According to this “hype”, the hitherto largely passive bulk of internet users would become highly active web content authors in the coming years or even site “programmers”. Thus, “Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people. [...] 2015, everyone alive will [..] write a song, author a book, make a video, craft a weblog, and code a program” (Kelly, Wired[5]). However, in order to motivate and enable the average surfer not just to consume but also to actively contribute new content, the web needs to be equipped with a suitable interactive interface, with whose help the user can rapidly and easily become active. RIAs bridge this gap perfectly with respect to the dizzying expectations of Web 2.0. They represent the technology, without which the entire aspiration and utopia would evaporate.

However, RIA technology offers so many advantages not only for the Web 2.0 community but also for everyday enterprise applications, that the demise of exclusively HTML based “poor ugly web applications” (PUWA) is foreseeable in the not too distant future.

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[1] Jeff McAffer, Jean-Michel Lemieux: Eclipse Rich Client Platform; Addison-Wesley, 2005.

[2] “Zero footprint” means that no additional Software needs to be installed on the client in order to launch an application

[3] Jesse James Garrett: AJAX: A New Approach to Web Applications; www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php

[4] Tim O’Reilly: What is Web 2.0;

[5] Kelly, K.: We are the Web. In: Wired 13.08 (08/2005)