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.

XForms meets Ajax: Can they get along?

“These two are very different technologies,” explains Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC. “Ajax is focused on the presentation and interaction with users across an asychronous set of interactions. XForms is focused solely on the issue of representing data collection and exchange between clients and servers.”

And according to the analyst they can and hopefully will work together.

“For sure, people are leveraging Ajax to do XForms-like things,” he said, “but I see a better world where Ajax is XForms-enabled. Since, Ajax is not a standard, but rather a collection of different UI operations. XForms, on the other hand, is a standard. It represents how form-based information is represented, collected and exchanged. For developers to use XForms as the standard and Ajax as the implementation / representation makes a lot more sense than either one replacing the other.”

Read more at: SearchWebServices

W3C approves specification for Web site scripting

An analyst, however, while saying the specification could yield better Web browsers, said support still is needed.

“DOM Level 2 is the latest rev of this model,” said Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink, in Waltham, Mass., in an e-mail response to an inquiry.

“While this is important for the developer crowd, the user population as a whole won’t really have much interaction with the DOM. It really is up to Web browser vendors like Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and the like to add this functionality to their products. So, we will need to wait until this makes its way into products before we can see any benefit,” he said.

Read more at: InfoWorld