News: Rich Internet Applications
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19/05/2009
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RIA = Rich Internet Application. For Microsoft this means either Silverlight or ASP.NET (Ajax) as the two technologies that deliver application User Interfaces/ User eXperiences via the Internet browser.
At their recent Mix ’09 web development conference as well as revealing some of the features of Silverlight 3, Microsoft announced .Net RIA services. .Net RIA Services technology will be able to take advantage of Silverlight 3’s “out of the browser” functionality, allowing users to still work in offline and intermittently connected scenarios.
Another overarching goal of .Net RIA Services is to allow developers to rapidly write a single set of middle-tier business application logic and data access logic componennts which can be successfully utilised by multiple UI technologies, i.e. Silverlight and ASP.NET. This is an often espoused but rarely realised goal.
.Net Developer Platform Software Architect Nikhil Kothari entered into further specifics in a recent blog post:
“As we looked at Silverlight planning, we realized RIA development is simply hard. There are too many moving pieces to manually stitch together between the client and the server. There are too many things that are un-natural, yet the norm, starting with the forced n-tier (many developers are used to writing 2-tier apps), async (when sync is the norm), dealing with latency (doing so incorrectly has the potential to break end-user experience), figuring out how to be less chatty, dealing with validation, conflicts, disconnected or occasionally connected scenarios, performing authentication and sharing user state across client and server, the list goes on and on…
We wanted to simplify RIA development… and bring back productivity for mainstream development, in much the same way that ASP.NET 1.0 provided client app developers a productive platform for developing Web apps. The pendulum has swung, and it is time to simplify RIA-style client development.”
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