The diverse nature of enterprise application requirements,
combined with the clear strengths and weaknesses of different RIA
technologies, lead to the inevitable conclusion that "one size does not
fit all."
No single RIA development approach is ideal for all enterprise
environments. Some requirements are better met by scripting-based RIA
approaches, while others require OOP. And in these two categories, a
particular application need will be better served by AJAX versus Flash,
or by Java versus .NET. In short, all four of these RIA technologies
are likely to co-exist in many enterprise environments for the near
future.
Interesting New Developments
All RIA solutions are
fundamentally constrained by their underlying technology - AJAX, Flash,
Java, or .NET. If a developer picks Flex to develop his RIA, he has to
live with the pros as well as cons of Flash. Likewise, if a developer
picks an AJAX toolkit to develop his RIA, she must live with the
various challenges associated with DHTML and JavaScript. As we
mentioned earlier, among the four technologies, each has its strengths
and weaknesses. One of the major goals of enterprise IT departments is
"common flexibility" - providing standardization and simplification
across different business applications and initiatives, while enabling
flexibility for innovation within business units. Different business
units have different programmer skills and therefore need different
types of applications. As a result, dictating the use of one RIA
technology across a large organization is unlikely to work well.
There's been a very interesting development in the RIA marketplace
recently: cross-technology RIA solutions. Both Laszlo Systems and
Nexaweb recently announced that their products are supporting more than
one technology so that the same application can be delivered and
rendered on different technology platforms. Laszlo supports both Flash
and AJAX (DHTML). Nexaweb supports Java and AJAX. With this
development, developers don't have to fight the "religious war" of
JavaScript versus Java, Java versus .NET, or .NET versus Flash. Such
development accommodates not only different developer skill sets, but
also opens the door to combining the benefits of scripting-based
approaches with those of OOP-based approaches, delivering optimal
results.
Figure 7 shows cross-technology RIA solution architecture.
Listing 2 is a sample application written using a cross-technology RIA
solution. It is an RSS reader that would read RSS feeds from Yahoo and
display all the feeds in a table. The code is Listing 2 and the UI
screen display is shown in Figure 8.
Enterprise RIA Adoption Today
Though still in an
evolutionary stage, RIAs have been adopted and proven at many leading
organizations over the world. Many companies have adopted RIAs as the
foundation for their business applications and achieved great success.
How broadly have RIAs been adopted? Though there are no
industry-recognized statistics available, numbers from RIA solution
vendors provide some insight. For example, Adobe claims that Flex has
about 300 customers. Nexaweb claims that its platform has been deployed
to over 4,000 enterprises.
It is also meaningful to look at which industries are adopting RIA.
According to a market study done by Nexaweb in October 2005, RIA
adoption spans a wide range of industries, with no single one
dominating. Financial services leads with a 17% share, followed closely
by healthcare, hospitability, and consumer products. (See Figure 9)
From an application profile perspective, companies adopt RIA solutions
for many different kinds of applications, including internal IT
applications, B2B applications, B2C applications, and B2C Web sites.
According to the same Nexaweb research, 48% of the RIAs deployed today
are enterprise business applications, either B2B or internal, while 45%
of them are deployed as consumer applications. (See Figure 10)
Conclusion
To leverage the Internet for
competitive advantage and lower operating costs, businesses need RIA
solutions to overcome the inherent limitations of the Web as a platform
for developing, deploying, and maintaining business applications.
There are different approaches based on Java,
.NET, AJAX, and Flash for RIA solutions, and each approach has its
strengths and weaknesses. Given the diverse application requirements in
enterprise environments, no single approach will be able to span all
enterprise environments. In the end, all four approaches will co-exist
serving different application requirements.
Though different RIA solutions may be based on different technology
approaches, the programming model centered on a declarative UI is
common. The real differentiator is application logic development, which
is determined by the RIA approach used by the chosen RIA solution. In
the end, the application logic development determines application
maintenance and scalability.
Cross-technology RIA solutions are exciting new developments. Such
solutions should enable enterprises to adopt a common model and
framework to meet different application requirements, while still
enabling innovation and accommodating different developer skill sets.
Though relatively young, enterprise RIA solutions have already been
adopted by many companies in many different industries led by the
financial services. As RIA solutions are further developed, RIA
adoption in enterprise environments will continue to grow.
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