Enterprise Rich Internet Applications

P.N. Anantharaman, Director, Engineering, Adobe Systems India

Over the last 5 years, three trends have been taking root in the Web world.

First, the nature of applications over the Web is changing from being minimally

interactive to highly interactive. These applications, being dynamic, often use

rich data, such as maps, etc,  and usher in new paradigms like collaboration

over the Web. Further, the notion that “one needs a browser to run a Web

application” is changing with applications that run outside the browser so that

they can have their own look and feel and interaction mechanisms just like any

desktop application. Second, the access mechanism to Web includes non-PC

devices, such as cell phones that stretch the convenience of accessing the Web

from anywhere, any time even further. Third, the emergence of hosted services

and the Cloud computing offerings offer exciting possibilities for both

businesses and the consumers. The common factor across these trends is the

strong need for immersive and enjoyable user experience. The traditional Web

applications are limited from lack of rich user interfaces, powerful interaction

and access models and local client processing. These applications are typically

server-centric, whereby any interaction by the user with the application results

in a round trip communication between the browser and the server. The server

generates the presentation content for the browser to display it. This results

in delay and page refreshes, thus impairing the user experience. In this

context, Rich Internet Applications (RIA) play a central role by combining the

expansive reach of the Web with the richness. The RIAs provide immersive user

experience by supporting rich data types that include multimedia,  local

processing at the client and connect to the server through standard protocols

that implement a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The ability of a RIA to

connect to services implies that it is easy to mash-up services from different

providers and create new, compelling applications that deliver unique value.

While RIAs have already been redefining the user experience in consumer

oriented applications such as product selection/configuration portals,

enterprises are adopting this technology very rapidly and moving to the

mainstream. RIAs have been reported to be very beneficial for a wide variety of

enterprise segments that include banking and finance, manufacturing, supply

chain management and intranet workflows. The enterprise applications over Web

often involve complex workflows and data entry. Enterprise RIAs enable several

benefits such as reduced errors in data entry, improved cycle times to complete

error free workflows, etc. The more natural and humanized user interfaces make

these applications more intuitive and hence easier to learn. These benefits

transform into business results for the enterprise; many RIA sites have reported

much higher conversion rates as compared to their earlier non RIA versions. The

RIAs excel not only in data capture but also in data presentation. RIA based

dashboards are very interactive and have been very successful.

RIAs can be developed by adopting the right platform. Both Open Source and

commercial RIA offerings, such as Adobe Flex, are available for application

development. The Enterprise RIAs require a powerful component library (that

helps charting, dashboard creation, etc), ability to handle large volumes of

data, support connectivity to the server through standard protocols for Service

Oriented Architecture and powerful tooling. The tooling not only includes IDEs

for application development that support the general edit/compile/debug process

but also advanced tools such as Automated Testing tools, Profilers, Code

coverage measurement tools etc. Most often the applications are required to run

across multiple browsers and on multiple operating environments. This

necessitates a multi platform development and hence the need for associated

tooling.

There are multiple toolkits and methodologies for implementing Enterprise

RIA using open source technologies such as Ajax. These have been well adopted

for many consumer applications particularly where the approach is to add RIA

capability incrementally. For transforming a legacy application to RIA in an

incremental way, technologies like Ajax provide a quick jump start. However,

ensuring consistency of the application behavior across a wide variety of

browsers is a major challenge and effort consuming in using these technologies

for a large scale enterprise application. Further, the fragmentation of the

development toolkits brings in the risks of throwing up incompatibility issues

and need thorough testing effort when a developer tries to mix and match

components from different tool vendors.

The commercial RIA offerings address the critical needs of enterprise RIA

development offering a complete stack of libraries, tool sets, server platforms

that are optimized for RIA. The stack often includes support for gathering

analytics of the application, which is very critical for arriving at business

decisions. These significantly reduce the effort needed to build complex RIA

applications and certify them. Such RIA offerings also provide tools that bridge

the workflow between visual designers, who create the wire frames for look and

feel of the application and the developers who build the application logic. For

example, Adobe Flash Catalyst adds interactivity to a visual asset created by

Adobe Creative Suite tools that can be imported to Adobe Flash Builder. Thus,

for example, a graphical object created by Adobe Illustrator can be made

functional as a Flex button by adding the behavior of the button through Flash

Catalyst. The other major opportunity to improve productivity of RIA development

is accomplished through bridging the Client/Server gap. A typical RIA involves

both the client side logic and a server or services backend. The recent advances

in RIA tooling enable a developer to quickly develop an end to end application

with minimal coding through a series of simple to use wizard steps. For example,

the Adobe Flash Builder 4.0 supports development of a complete Flex application

that can connect to a variety of web service back ends such as: SOAP, REST, AMF

(PHP, Java, Adobe ColdFusion).

Enterprise RIA is entering the mainstream adoption. This is helped

significantly by the value proposition of RIA technology and also the maturity

and availability of RIA development tools. With the ever growing need for

compelling user experience on Web as more and more applications get hosted, the

role of RIA is central.

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