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.

OpenAjax Alliance tackles interoperability

With development of the hub, the alliance is dealing with its top priority, said Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst at ZapThink, in an e-mail response to questions.

“There is a critical need for OpenAjax at this point in time, because each vendor’s AJAX implementation is generally incompatible with the others,” Bloomberg said. “Basically, even though each AJAX widget leverages XML and JavaScript, both of which are open standards, that doesn’t mean that one widget from one toolkit will work with another widget from some other toolkit. The most important goal of OpenAjax is figuring out how to resolve this interoperability problem. Clearly, Ajax will be far more successful if any widget works with any other widget, toolkit, or platform.”

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.

Curl: Pioneering Rich Clients for SOAs

A new class of presentation layer is emerging to solve a range of user interface challenges. Users are demanding a rich client interface to Web Services that provides an end user experience similar to client/server applications, with a rich graphical user interface, responsive performance and highly interactive functionality. The goal of this emerging rich client solution is to provide the optimal combination of rich, low-cost interaction through standards-based distributed computing.

Curl is a veteran to the market of rich client solutions for distributed Internet applications. The basis of their solution is their own runtime environment called Surge that provides an executable environment for the Curl language. Curl also provides a language that supports a rich set of user interface capabilities that users can extend to provide additional functionality, from simple macros to direct control over the positioning of subcomponents.

Report: The time for rich clients is now

In fact, a recent research report from Waltham, Mass.-based research firm ZapThink LLC declares that browsers and portals just don’t do the job at the presentation layer, and enterprises using Web services need to start investigating rich clients.

The ZapThink report points out that the Web has moved distributed computing off the Web browser and thick clients, to rich clients that are loosely coupled from the distributed computing infrastructures they expose.

“[Users] are demanding a set of rich-client capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications,” said the report, written by senior analyst Ronald Schmelzer.

Read more at: TechTarget

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services

ZapThink: Client-side Web Technologies Inadequate to Meet Evolving Needs of Web Services
New Class of Rich and Smart Clients Evolving to Solve Next-Generation Computing Needs

WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–March 3, 2004–The Internet and Web have provided immense scalability and manageability benefits to computer users for a decade now, but at a price – poor support for rich interactivity. Now, companies are increasingly demanding a rich set user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. ZapThink concludes in its report entitled “Rich and Smart Clients for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs)” that today’s Web technologies are wholly inadequate to meet the needs of emerging standards-based, loosely coupled, distributed applications.

“Simply put, today’s corporate portals must move beyond Web-based thin client technologies,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink. “Rather, companies must leverage the power of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures to offer rich clients that provide deep interactivity, yet retain the scalability and manageability benefits that browsers provide.”

ZapThink’s report analyzes a new class of rich client vendor offering and several approaches to providing rich clients that in part rely upon SOAs to provide the optimal combination of rich user interaction and low cost of ownership through standards-based distributed computing. The report identifies the windows of opportunities as well as market growth predictions for new entrants and incumbent vendors.

Other key findings of the report include:

• Rich clients will supplant portals as the primary interface to Web Services and Service-oriented functionality in the enterprise by the end of 2007.
• The total opportunity for rich clients for SOAs is over $923 million by 2010.
• The window of opportunity for new entrants in the rich client market will start to wane with the release of the Microsoft Longhorn update of windows in the 2006-2007 timeframe.
• The increasing adoption of sometimes-connected devices, mobile computing, asynchronous computing, and e-Forms will mandate widespread and rapid adoption of rich clients.

The report, available on ZapThink’s website at www.zapthink.com, discusses several companies, including Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), Altio, Apple, AT&T, Citrix, Curl, Cysive, DreamFactory, FileMaker, Focus Solutions, General Interface, Harmonia, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, JackBe, Kinitos, Laszlo Systems, Lucent, Macromedia (NASDAQ: MACR), Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Motorola, Mozilla, Nexaweb, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL), Oracle, Plumtree, RatchetSoft, SAP, SCO Group (NASDAQ: SCOX), Siebel, Softricity, TiVo, Vignette, and Vultus.

Read more at: ZapThink Press Release

Rich and Smart Clients for Service-Oriented Architectures

Companies originally moved to adopt standards-based technologies like those underlying the Web and the Internet as a way to achieve distributed computing functionality at a very low total cost of ownership. However, these companies had to forego many of the user interface and productivity advantages that other distributed computing methods, such as traditional client/server applications, used to give them. As a result, companies continue to struggle to address the issue of how to realize the benefits of rich clients in conjunction with the benefits of distributed, low-cost applications.

While companies have long delivered application functionality to Web browsers, users are now coming to expect increasingly greater interactivity from this presentation tier. They are demanding a set of rich user experience capabilities that include visual interactivity elements and instant access to information, interaction with distributed and remote applications, and integration with local desktop applications. Businesses today want to gain the operational and cost advantages of Internet and Web Services technologies, but don’t want the limitations that Web browsers impose on user interfaces.

This report discusses and analyzes approaches to providing the optimal combination of rich client interaction and low-cost interaction through standards-based distributed computing. In addition, this report will present an approach to designing SOAs that appropriately abstract presentation layer considerations and enable users to choose the user interfaces that are most appropriate to their business needs without having to change any underlying business logic.

SCO Buys Web Services Tool Vendor

Ronald Schmelzer, analyst for market research firm ZapThink LLC, said the acquisition was interesting because of Vultus’s focus on the presentation layer of web services applications. “It’s a bold move by SCO, since not even IBM or Microsoft have put a lot of thought or emphasis on the presentation layer of web services,” Schmelzer said. “It’s also necessary since SCO doesn’t have any strong presentation layer capabilities of their own.”

Read more at: TechWeb

Presentation-Layer Web Services

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Web Services Technologies & Trends

From its inception through 2002, the primary application for Web Services in the enterprise was to simplify point-to-point integration between systems, thereby reducing the cost of integration. This application of Web Services, however, only scratches the surface of the true potential of Web Services — enabling companies to build agile business processes and IT systems that can respond to change through the use of loosely coupled, standards-based Service-oriented architectures.

The business value of such architectures in terms of the business agility they provide is substantial, but as of early 2003, only a few early adopter enterprises have built such architectures, partly because few tools for building Service-oriented architectures are available on the market, and furthermore, there is little understanding of the best practices companies should follow to build such architectures. This report seeks to clarify the requirements for realizing the value of Web Services by providing a set of emerging best pra