Rich Internet Applications

Last week I attended LIFT in Geneva, Switzerland. LIFT is a conference that explores the challenges and opportunities of technology in society. The conference discusses new technologies and their impact on society from a user’s point of view.

Here are some trends I observed:

Disclaimer: this is my personal view and interpretation of LIFT. Please feel free to add a comment or point out any errors.

Better Interfaces

There are companies such as Headshift looking to create new web tools that will help to manage information overload and personal productivity in large networks or organizations. They held a workshop at LIFT to hear ideas and opinions about hybrid web interfaces for email, RSS feeds, and concepts such as Getting Things Done.

I was in a parallel workshop called Forgetful Interfaces, discussing new ways to display the huge amounts of stored data we have accumulated. It was a very broad discussion and I went out of the workshop with more questions than answers. One proposal was to build interfaces like the human memory: data linked to recent events is available immediately, and as time flies, the data - i.e. the interface items related to the data - that you have not used over the past year fades away. For example, items in a to do list are important in the short term, but will tend to clutter search results one year from now without adding any added value.

These two workshops highlight the need for better web interfaces for knowledge workers. The amount of information from various data streams is due to increase, and the challenge is to build business process, as well as knowledge management tools that will increase efficiency and productivity. As Web 2.0 moves into the corporate world, I’m expecting the need for richer, adaptable interfaces to grow.

Scalability

One of the most common questions asked by the Venture Night panel on Wednesday evening was: What about scalability? If your web app is successful and draws millions of users, will the architecture be able to handle this? How are you addressing the performance issue?

Mobile computing

Francesco Cara of Nokia described the evolution of mobile communication ecosystems. We are currently in the third stage where new features and services are being introduced rapidly, new players such as Apple and Google moving into the market, the complexity is increasing, and more mobile applications are accessing the Internet directly.

Within this context, I couldn’t help but think of Canoo’s RIA for Mobiles project, that Christian wrote about in January 2008.

Further links on LIFT 08:

LIFT videos

Bruno Giussani’s blog

Stephanie Booth’s blog

Hannes Gassert’s notes in the Liip blog

Here are a couple of interesting RIA links that I stumbled across during the past week:

Java FX
Javalobby has posted an interview with Tom Ball, lead architect on the openjfx compiler project:

We’ve been interviewing lots of design houses, and the biggest complaint they have with Java-based client applications is how much longer it takes the Swing engineers to turn a design cycle than the designers do — the designers can crack out a design in a week which their developer counterparts take three months to implement.

It is definitely an encouraging sign to see that Sun is moving ahead in this area.

10 Future Web Trends
Richard MacManus lists RIA in his list of 10 Future Web Trends:

As the current trend of hybrid web/desktop apps continues, expect to see RIA (rich internet apps) continue to increase in use and functionality. Adobe’s AIR platform (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is one of the leaders, along with Microsoft with its Windows Presentation Foundation. Also in the mix is Laszlo with its open source OpenLaszlo platform and there are several other startups offering RIA platforms. Let’s not forget also that Ajax is generally considered to be an RIA - it remains to be seen though how long Ajax lasts, or whether there will be a ‘2.0′.

Flex vs. Silverlight
James Ward compares Flex and Microsoft Silverlight in this interview published at InfoQ.

Do you use AJAX, RIA or other Web 2.0?
Eric Chiu asks in this thread on LinkedIn (you’ll probably need to log in to read the thread):

Do you use AJAX, RIA, or other Web 2.0?

Do you think AJAX made the web easier to use? What are some of your favorite AJAX frameworks? I would like to know how companies are using AJAX to improve usability, interaction and collaboration.

Most people in the thread reported that they are using AJAX libraries such as Prototype, JQuery and RIA tools such as Adobe Flex. Perfomance and security are major concerns. While others cite customization and extensibility as being important.

If you are not familiar with the term Web 2.0, this introductory article lists some links as a quick jump-start. In the second part, we try to point out what this development means for enterprise software.

Tim O’Reilly was among the first to come up with the term. Web 2.0 represents a shift in who creates content, moving from a small group of programmers and content developers to nearly everyone that has a computer and Internet access. One of the effects is the increased focus on web user interfaces and the technologies that are being used to develop a better, improved user experience. These new technologies make the interface smooth and intuitive just like desktop software and hide distributed processing from the user.

This Wikipedia article explains the background of Web 2.0. Listed below is a collection of useful Web 2.0 links:

Overview of Web 2.0 Applications and Web Services

• Web 2.0 References as Icons: www.go2web20.net
• German Web 2.0 References: www.web2null.de

Applications

• Google applications: www.google.com/a/
• Google’s Online word processing application: online word processing application
• Web based mail client: mail.yahoo.com
• Online image manipulation application: demo.neximage.com

Blogging

• Blog tool and weblog platform: wordpress.org
• Blog search: technorati.com

Collaborative Work

• Project collaboration, management and tasks: www.basecamphq.com
• Get and stay organized: Keep your to-dos, notes, ideas and schedule online: backpackit.com
• Collaborative writing software online with Writeboard. Write, share, revise, compare: www.writeboard.com
• Think together - collaborative online mind mapping tool: www.mindmeister.com
• A place to share and discover slideshows and presentations: www.slideshare.net
• Open source messaging, calendar platform: www.zimbra.com

Developing

• Public source code repository to store and organize code snippets: snipplr.com
• Sharing developer bookmarks: www.dzone.com

Social Networking

• Maintain your social network - focused on Europe: www.xing.com
• Maintain your social network - focused on US: www.linkedin.com
• Social bookmarking: del.icio.us
• Store, sort, search and share photos: www.flickr.com
• Flex application visualizing Flickr networks: www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph

Traveling / Maps

• Route planning, interactive maps: www.map24.com
• Regional restaurants, shops, business … meet people (German, English coming soon): www.qype.com
• Switzerland: weather, traffic, news, restaurants, culture, shopping: map.search.ch

Enterprise Web 2.0

What does this mean for enterprise software? Increasingly customers will expect business software to offer the same ease of use they are experiencing at other web sites.

For example, users that appreciate Flickr’s “edit in place” description fields will expect other web software to offer similar features.

Or, they will expect the collaborative benefits of tagging, commenting, as well as following changes by RSS feed in their business workflow applications.

See also this recent post by Gapingvoid on the convergence of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and social software:

The main story about social software is not about how it allows you to carry out existing company functions, just more quickly and easily. It’s bigger than that. In the future, companies will grow around social software, not the other way around.

The question is: What does your software need to meet this Web 2.0 culture and how can your business profit?

See also Hans-Dirk’s initial post.

Another day at Jazoon which of course was dominated by having our talk in the afternoon (see my previous post to get the resources). I guess there were about 50 people attending (it was difficult to see into the audience from the stage). Not too bad compared to the average I saw in other talks.

I still managed to attend some other talks.

JMaki, a framework for designing AJAX applications with a lot of IDE support (Netbeans and Eclipse) is definitely something to keep an eye on. The talk was a good show, but they had too many slides which they just scrolled over to get to the details. The main features of JMaki:

• Support of creating a new ajax web project (in the tradition of Maven, Grails etc.)
• Layout and theme support (done in CSS)
• Integration of several Ajax widgets libraries (Dojo, Scriptaculous, Google etc.). This widgets can be dragged into the web application easily.
• Client Services: A publish/subscribe bus on the client which enables the widgets to talk to each other. This bus is hidden from the developer, but they at least they added some debug support. On top of it they provide an API for the developer to specify the application behaviour.

Check out the JMaki Project for more.

Just before it was our turn, Ed Burns talked about testing AJAX applications. He compared four testing frameworks (Parasoft Webking, OpenQA Selenium, HttpUnit, Mozilla Control Program (MCP)) with regard to following features:
- compatible (running on Windows, Mac and Unix)
- automate-able (integrating in JUnit or TestNG)
- simple API
- capable (support of Ajax)
- detailed

There wasn’t a winner, depending on your need, each framework has some advantages. Ed decided to demonstrate MCP more closely especially how to test AJAX-enriched sites. The demo included some weird hacks (using bitsets for the test result), but then MCP is just not very mature yet.

I asked Ed if he knows Canoo Webtest and of course he did. He told me that it didn’t make it into the talk because of the lack of AJAX support. This is not the whole truth, AJAX is supported partially by Canoo WebTest, meaning as long as it produces valid JavaScript.

Another day at Jazoon and still no time for shopping!