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.

Laszlo Open-Sources App-Building Platform

Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Waltham, Mass., called Laszlo’s decision “interesting” but also “somewhat desperate.” Schmelzer said, “The issue is that Macromedia is the real juggernaut here. Their Flex product is going to significantly impact the market for rich client technology, and it’s hard to see how a startup can effectively compete against a company with 98-percent penetration on the desktop and millions of developer customers.”

Schmelzer said open source should not be viewed as a panacea. “Startups now think that open source is the magic bullet that somehow helps them avoid having to effectively sell and market their product. There are two fallacies with this thought. First, that open source means free. If it’s free, then open source by definition isn’t a business model. If it’s not free, then you still have to sell it. Second, why would a developer want to put their time and effort into developing a Flash-based application that has a limited market when you can spend the same amount of time developing on top of a platform that already has millions of users?

“Fundamentally, Laszlo will have to compete directly with Macromedia for Flash-based rich clients. They only way they can survive is to produce a well-differentiated value proposition for both end-user customers and developers. Open source doesn’t do anything to help that value proposition.”

Read more at: eWeek

Laszlo Systems: Rich Client Capabilities Based on Macromedia Flash

In the past, 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. Companies looking to implement rich client technologies across a heterogeneous IT infrastructure will be most interested in a new breed of solution focused specifically on providing rich user interaction across standards-based, loosely coupled distributed computing environments. This solution set is the class of rich client-focused technologies.

Laszlo Systems has produced its own server-side offering called the Laszlo Presentation Server and XML-based development language called LZX to that provides rich client interaction and consumption of Web Services through the delivery of interactive Macromedia Flash SWF files to end-user clients.