RIA Specialties 

One of the earliest applications of RIA technology was to enable a greater degree of interaction with consumers for data, visualization, and/or transaction-intensive web applications. Existing HTML and HTTP-based web applications are not able to easily power interaction-intensive applications such as product configurators, trading and asynchronous, event-driven transactions, and applications requiring intensive data manipulation and visualization. In the early years, Java applets and Flash-powered websites dominated this RIA application type, but increasingly AJAX-based RIA solutions are finding their way to delivering high-touch web interaction in both business-to-consumer (B2C) as well as business-to-business (B2B) realms.

Web-based portals have a number of significant limitations that prevent them from providing much of the value that businesses demand. In particular, portals provide Web only access to aggregated data that the IT department has configured on behalf of users beforehand. RIA solutions promise to break the mold of today’s inflexible and online-only portal offerings by allowing end users to control their own composition of business logic, integrate portal information with local sources of data, and even take portal information off-line. Applying RIA solutions to the concept of the portal will either make today’s portals obsolete or bring them to the next generation. In either case, it is only through the application of RIA approaches that portal solutions will achieve this next step in value. A number of examples exist in this RIA problem domain across a wide range of vertical industries implemented for a wide range of customers for their internal or B2B portals.

In much the same way that today’s portals are ill-suited to the rich user interaction requirements that end-users desire, many business intelligence and analytics applications provide good data aggregation but poor user interaction with consolidated data. A number of RIA solutions vendors have built new classes of dashboard and situational awareness type applications that provide users a way of getting continuously updated, event-driven, asynchronous, and highly interactive access to complicated and changing data. So far, many of these dashboard or situational awareness applications have been for intelligence-driven needs. As such, project sizes range from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for these applications and can take months to years to fully develop.

Many vendors are focusing their RIA solutions not just on applications already Internet or Web-enabled, but also on those applications that are still primarily client/server, mainframe, or 4GL-based. For many companies, their existing investment in legacy systems represents a conundrum: they are too valuable to replace and too expensive or brittle to maintain. In this vein, RIA solutions have come to the rescue by allowing companies to maintain the business logic and user interface styles that they have come to depend on while simultaneously leveraging the economic benefit of the Internet and new capabilities that RIA solutions offer. These modernized applications with RIA capabilities can then be deployed internally or over the Internet as required.

Another category of RIA solutions increasingly adopted are a new class of applications that seek to compose Service functionality from multiple systems to create new, dynamic applications that can communicate with disparate Services on the network or with other clients similarly enabled. In the Service oriented context, the sort of enterprise mashups that businesses require combine rich interface capabilities with Service-Oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) that enable not only the use, but also the creation and configuration of the SOBAs themselves. Furthermore, the Services that make up the SOBA composition might abstract capabilities on either the client or the server. One of the reasons why enterprise mashups are so compelling is because enabling business users to assemble Services, and thus create new applications, in flexible, innovative ways, within the context of a governance framework, has broad, untapped business value. The notion of peer-to-peer Web applications or enterprise mashups is still significantly immature and hasn’t seen that many actual end-user implementations leveraging RIA solutions. However, the promise of distributing business logic to the client and allowing those clients to dynamically compose functionality from multiple, disparate Services represents a business opportunity so great that this application category might represent the bulk of RIA spending the not-too-distant future.