ZapThink: RIAs Based on Ajax, Flash, and Java Will Supplant Static Web Applications and Portals

ZapThink: RIAs Based on Ajax, Flash, and Java Will Supplant Static Web Applications and Portals
ZapThink – July 27, 2006

Demand for Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and more sophisticated user interaction is increasing dramatically, and enterprise spending on RIA applications will surpass $500 million by 2011, according to ZapThink. The analysts say enhancements to six types of business applications are helping drive RIA spending: high-transaction and event-driven Internet applications, next-generation portals, enhanced business intelligence solutions, application modernization, and Service composition or “mashup” solutions.

In a new report, ZapThink describes RIAs as providing an end user experience that combines the experience that users are most familiar with in desktop and client/server applications — such as rich graphical user interface, responsive performance and highly interactive functionality — with the scalability, distribution, and manageability benefits that Internet applications provide.

“Users today increasingly demand more from their online user experiences,” said Ronald Schmelzer, founder and senior analyst with ZapThink. “The convergence of SOA and Web 2.0 are leading organizations to retire their static Web pages and inflexible portal applications. Today’s set the bar for user interactivity higher than ever before, and expect their online exper

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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.

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

PDFs Native to The New Office

Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst at research firm ZapThink, said the support is a realization by Microsoft that PDF is an important part of the workflow process for many organizations. Many use Office for their content and collaboration work and go to PDF to archive their work in a format everyone can use, he said.

Microsoft’s decision to include PDF natively is also going to put the pinch on Adobe (Quote, Chart), the document format’s creator, Schmelzer said.

“I think [Microsoft] sees the Adobe/Macromedia combination as a formidable challenger in the market, especially in the Office side of things, and by embedding PDF, they’re cutting off one form of revenue that Adobe gets, which is obviously from Acrobat,” he said.

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Microsoft Unveils Web Design Tool Set

Macromedia’s tools are most widely used on Apple’s Macintosh hardware, which is still the platform of choice for graphics and Web site designers, said Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst for Zapthink, a research firm in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“Macromedia and Adobe aren’t that threatened because they have a Macintosh installed base,” he said. “Most designers prefer the Macintosh [as a platform], and I don’t see Microsoft offering Expression for the Mac anytime soon.”

Read more at: PC World

Macromedia Forges Ahead in Light (or Shadow) of Merger

“One significant impact that the merger will have is that Flash is now available on a wider range of platforms, including mobile interfaces,” says ZapThink’s Ron Schmelzer, referring to Flash Lite, the version of the Flash profile designed for mobile devices. “If people now know that they can deploy Flash to mobile, just imagine all the cool things they can do.”

Taken altogether, the advances in Studio 8 suggest that the impending merger has done little to dampen the innovation and user-centric approach that have made Macromedia so successful. “People like to use their products,” states ZapThink’s Schmelzer. Should the merger finalize, users can hope that this will remain true as the duo builds upon the core strengths of its individual products in its combined offerings.

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Sun Open-Sources JavaServer Faces

Still, one analyst was pleased to see JSF open-sourced. Sun open-sourcing JSF is “a very positive thing,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink LLC in Cambridge, Mass.

“The way we see JavaServer Faces is that it’s a technology for enabling rich Internet apps, in much the same way that Macromedia Flex, AJAX and Microsoft Avalon are trying to rich-enable the client experience,” said Schmelzer.

“The problem is that not many developers know how to use JSF, and it’s a good idea to let it breathe a bit so that more folks can become familiar with the rich client technology,” he said. “JSF’s biggest threats are really the evolution of AJAX and Flash as robust RIA [Rich Internet Applications] technologies, and as such, the challenge will be to show why developers should leverage JSF rather than those approaches.”

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The Return of AJAX?

That’s a huge leap in logic to make, said Ron Schmelzer, a senior analyst with research firm ZapThink. He points to the claims made by Sun Microsystems (Quote, Chart) in the late 1990s with its “network as a computer” concept of putting software on the server.

“Just because you can run application functionality remotely doesn’t mean it’s appropriate for everything, like when you’re offline,” he said. “Basically, anything that requires productivity over distribution, there’s no reason to have a remote word processor because what’s the benefit of having it over the Web versus having it on your desktop?”

Developers have Firefox and other alternative browsers, with their native XML support, to thank for the recent change by Microsoft to incorporate more Web standards, Schmelzer said.

Microsoft has had robust XML since IE 6, he said, but the company was pushing ActiveX (define) over using XML and JavaScript as the method of choice. Firefox’s growing popularity, however, has shifted opinion that XML is the way to go for data, rather than the Windows-centric ActiveX.

“There’s no such thing as ActiveX on the Mac platform or Linux platform, so when you’re building a Web site and say, ‘I’m using ActiveX,’ you are going to by necessity cut out some of your audience,” he said.

ZapThink’s Schmelzer sees Web development coalescing around two interactive development platforms: AJAX and Macromedia’s (Quote, Chart) Flash.

“The person who builds a Flash application is not exactly the same kind of person who would build an AJAX application, but at some point I think those are going to be the two dominant, rich Internet solutions out there,” he said.

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Borland, Macromedia back Eclipse

“What makes [the Eclipse plug-in] compelling is that Macromedia is now targeting the mainstream developer audience for their rich user interface apps, whereas before they targeted a more specialized designer audience,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

Read more at: InfoWorld

Microsoft Unveils Tools To Prep Developers For Longhorn

The latest Indigo release contains many of the technologies that Microsoft promised earlier, Ron Schmelzer, analyst for market researcher ZapThink, said.

“What is interesting is the peer-to-peer technologies that will allow companies to develop service-oriented applications that don’t require any application server or even a message-bus infrastructure,” Schmelzer said in an email.

Microsoft is apparently betting that companies will be willing to adopt peer-to-peer in service-oriented architectures, Schmelzer said. SOAs are an evolution in distributed computing that’s based on web services standards.

Avalon, on the other hand, is a presentation subsystem that unifies how Windows creates, displays and manipulates documents and media. Through Avalon’s 3D, animation and other capabilities, developers can build richer user interfaces for their applications, Microsoft said.

Avalon’s enhancements include a new electronic-document format called “Metro”, which Microsoft is positioning as a “potential PDF-killer”, Schmelzer said. PDF is a popular document format from Adobe Systems, which recently bought Macromedia, a maker of tools for developing media-rich presentation layers for web applications.

“Now that Adobe and Macromedia have merged, and with Microsoft focusing on e-documents as a next beachhead, we might start to see some really interesting innovation happening in this part of the market,” Schmelzer said.

Finally, InfoCard, which can be used by any Windows application, leverages web services standards for federated identity management. The technology provides developers with a framework that enables people to use the same user ID and password to conduct transactions across a company’s website and those of its partners. The technology supports a wide range of security mechanisms.

InfoCard takes up where Microsoft’s previous attempt at identity management, Passport, failed. Companies shunned the technology because it required them to centralise their identity information with Microsoft, Schmelzer said. Also, Passport required all parties to adopt a single identity technology.

“The idea (for InfoCard) is sound, given that companies are starting to move to federated, rather than single-technology, centralised, identity-management systems,” Schmelzer said.

Within the market for federated identity management, Microsoft faces competition with the Liberty Alliance, an industry consortium developing technology and standards.

“But there are still very few products, if any, that implement Liberty Alliance on the desktop client, and so Microsoft has a distinct advantage,” Schmelzer said.

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