Barber’s Pole

Pushing the Envelope on RIA Development

Posted by Simon
October 7, 2005

Excerpt from Introducing the Flex 2 Product Line on Macromedia Developer Center written by David Wadhwani:

“Macromedia coined the phrase “Rich Internet Application” a few years ago after seeing what developers and designers were building in Macromedia Flash. It was clear that these applications extended the design limitations and interaction constraints of traditional HTML applications. They didn’t require a full page refresh when users interacted with them. They efficiently utilized network bandwidth, transmitting only the portion of the data that changed and transmitting layout information sparingly. They contained a rich array of interactions that allowed end users to directly manipulate the data with which they were interacting. They seamlessly layered audio and video into the application’s user interface. They clearly maintained their context as the user navigated through the application. And, of course, they supported high-fidelity printing.

The impact of Rich Internet Applications has been incredible, both in breadth and depth. We’re seeing everyone from Internet hobbyists to large enterprises building RIAs—and seeing their business improve dramatically as a result. Large financial services institutions use RIAs to solidify their brand with customers and speed up internal business decision-making through better interaction with mission-critical data. Online retailers have reduced shopping cart abandonment by 50% during the checkout process. Individual developers have integrated slick online mapping services with webcams posted on New York City’s traffic lights to give commuters the most up-to-date and useful traffic information.

As customers began to broaden their use of Rich Internet Applications, developers quickly recognized some special needs. Some RIAs need to consume real-time data feeds. Others need to run in occasionally connected environments, intelligently synchronizing data when a connection is established. Others need to consume proprietary binary protocols. Still others require that multiple clients share a single instance of data.

Based on these observations, and our experience building Flex 1.0, we set out to deliver an RIA platform that addressed these needs and could be extended easily to meet the specific needs of a given application. We wanted to give application developers a client runtime, development environment, class libraries, and data services that help developers do the following:

Be extremely productive in RIA application development

Create expressive applications with effective interface patterns

Deploy applications through a well-distributed, high-performance, cross-platform, cross-browser runtime environment

Use tools and technologies that scale with the size of the project and complexity of the task

We are thrilled to introduce the Flex 2 product line as the best way to build a wide range of immersive applications, from simple restaurant menus to complex workflow systems and synchronized trader desktops.

If you’re familiar with Flex 1.0, it’s very important to recognize that Flex 2 is far more than just a new release. It represents a major milestone in the evolution of the Flex technology and a continued evolution in Macromedia development processes. From a technical standpoint, Flex 2 introduces capabilities that enable developers to build an entirely new class of Rich Internet Applications, ushering in a new generation of RIAs. At the same time, we’re opening up Flex development to a much broader group of developers by re-introducing Flex Builder, which has been built from the ground up on the Eclipse open-source IDE framework and now includes Flex Framework and the compiler. That means that Flex applications can be deployed as a stand-alone option by placing a compiled SWF file on any web server or in conjunction with Flex Enterprise Services 2.”

The Flash Platform has really matured.

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Pushing the Envelope on RIA Development

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