Evolution of the Rich Internet Application Market

As the Internet continues to penetrate every aspect of our lives, both business and personal, the distinction between “Internet application” and “application” increasingly fades from view. Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) operate in the sweet spot among richness of Internet capability, richness of user interactivity, and richness of client-side computing capability. RIAs act as Service consumers as part of Service-Oriented Architecture implementations and enable Enterprise Mashups.

Since ZapThink first covered the space in 2002, the RIA market has matured considerably, establishing two core submarkets: RIA environments and RIA components. Adobe Systems emerging as a leader in the RIA environments submarket with their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) and Flex products. Microsoft is a strong contender with their newer Silverlight technology. Open source vendors have emerged as significant players, and form a large portion of the RIA components submarket.

While the RIA market should continue to grow for the next few years, it will most likely merge with other markets long term and be indifferentiable from a market sizing perspective as the RIA category increasingly overlaps with other existing desktop and Internet application categories.

Enterprise mashups

The end result may be attractive, but the relative ease with which mashups can be created carries a certain degree of inherent risk. Typically, little more than JavaScript skills are required, and toolkits that ease the development process such as Tibco General Interface Builder and Backbase are proliferating. “That’s why you’d better have a way for IT management and control,” advises Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot, which hosts wikis for business users.

ZapThink’s Bloomberg agrees. “The last thing a manager wants is for employees to assemble composite applications willy-nilly, with no controls in place or visibility by management. That’s an accident waiting to happen.”

Governance also comes into play for internal data sources, to ensure that confidential information is not inadvertently shared. This requires good governance in the form of policies, access management, and at least spot-checked approval. “For example, a business analyst has the right to mashup the call center screens, but a customer service rep does not,” ZapThink’s Bloomberg says. Over time, he expects mashup development tools to help enforce access and use policies, allowing IT to set the policies and less technical staff to assemble mashups based on their roles. But in the meantime, “you can only tell them what to do and get on their case if they don’t.”

Mashup governance goes beyond policies, Bloomberg notes. “Part of the challenge for IT is to build the right services at the right granularity,” he says, so that mashup assemblers aren’t tempted to go around IT. The use of external services and data sources should be treated the same way, vetted by IT — and perhaps the legal department — and made available in a sanctioned repository.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Rich Internet Applications: Market Trends and Technologies

Two of the often conflicting desires in IT are the need for rich user interfaces that maximize a user’s productivity on the one hand and the desire to decentralize computing so that a user can gain access to the widest base of IT assets at the lowest possible cost on the other. These two forces are at odds because rich client interfaces, until recently, have only been possible in certain limited scenarios in which the business logic and computing resources were combined with the interface.

However, a new class of presentation layer is emerging in the marketplace. This Rich Internet Application provides an end user experience that is similar to client/server applications, with a rich graphical user interface, responsive performance and highly interactive functionality. As companies desire richer interaction between their Web Services-based applications and the users of those applications, Rich Internet Applications will continue to gain prominence in the enterprise. Users will increasingly demand the ability to present very large data sets to a dispersed audience without sacrificing the economics that Web applications or the rich user experience that traditional client/server applications provide.

While significant attention and hype have recently been placed on emerging RIA technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), there are still many questions about precisely what business problems are driving RIA adoption. Furthermore, is the RIA class of applications merely a flash in the pan soon to be subsumed by a more potent solution to business problems, or is there sustainability and repeatability in RIA solutions that provide long-lasting and compelling value to businesses? As such, this report aims to tackle the following questions to help establish the current state of the RIA market, quantify business trends, and postulate the future of the RIA markets:

• What are the emerging classes of business problems targeted by RIA solutions?
• What are businesses currently spending on RIA solutions, and how will this change over time?
• What are the primary technological approaches being implemented by businesses, and how will these trends play out over the next few years?
• Who are the primary buyers of RIA solutions and how does this impact RIA deal sizes?
• What is the prospective market sizing for RIA solutions and how will this change over time?
• How are RIA solutions categorized by different segment and market approaches?

This report aims to identify emerging market trends and address the above questions, but does not aim to specifically analyze individual RIA solutions or product offerings, nor rank vendors according to how they meet specific business requirements.

AJAX Captures Enterprise Imagination

One other note about developing AJAX-based applications: Don’t try to slip AJAX into a product just because it’s the latest technology. As ZapThink senior analyst Ron Schmelzer puts it, AJAX by itself isn’t a differentiator. No doubt anyone who tries to sell A JAX-based products — or any developers who propose using AJAX in-house — will still have to prove that their implementation actually does something worthwhile.

“AJAX by itself doesn’t mean anything,” Schmelzer says. “You can say, ‘Hey, I’ve got AJAX,’ but the response is going to be, OK, but what does your product do?’ ”

Given the benefits of AJAX — both for the front end and in the back office Latest News about back office systems — Schmelzer says it won’t be hard for a lot of companies to come up with products that use AJAX wisely and in innovative ways. In fact, he says he sees uses for it everywhere he looks. “A of the next versions [of applications] that people will buy — a lot of those versions will have AJAX based interfaces,” he says. “By this time next year, AJAX will be everywhere.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Putting AJAX to work

One other note about developing AJAX-based applications: Don’t try to slip AJAX into a product just because it’s the latest technology. As ZapThink senior analyst Ron Schmelzer puts it, AJAX by itself isn’t a differentiator. No doubt anyone who tries to sell AJAX-based products — or any developers who propose using AJAX in-house — will still have to prove that their implementation actually does something worthwhile.

“AJAX by itself doesn’t mean anything,” Schmelzer says. “You can say, ‘Hey, I’ve got AJAX,’ but the response is going to be, ‘OK, but what does your product do?’ ”

Given the benefits of AJAX — both for the front end and in the back office — Schmelzer says it won’t be hard for a lot of companies to come up with products that use AJAX wisely and in innovative ways. In fact, he says he sees uses for it everywhere he looks. “A lot of the next versions [of applications] that people will buy — a lot of those versions will have AJAX based interfaces,” he says. “By this time next year, AJAX will be everywhere.”

Read more at: InfoWorld

Backbase: AJAX-based Rich Internet Applications

Users today increasingly demand more from their online user experiences. Gone are the days of static web pages and poor interaction; today’s new mantra is Rich Internet Applications. Combining real-time user interaction with rich user interface capabilities, Rich Internet Applications leverage increasingly sophisticated browser-side technology to enable users to interact with online, distributed applications as if they were on their own machine. Increasingly, companies are looking to Flash as well as Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) based technologies to make their RIA wishes come true.

Pioneering the field of AJAX-based rich internet applications is BACKBASE, a software vendor that aims to simplify the way that RIAs are built, deployed, and consumed. The company aims to simplify RIA development by extending the already well-known HTML and web development approaches and technologies, making it a simple step for developers to extend today’s Web interfaces to be tomorrow’s Rich Internet apps.