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.

ZapNote: RatchetSoft

As ZapThink discusses in most of its research, Web Services provide an excellent means for exposing application functionality as network-discoverable Services that can then be consumed and composed as needed to suit evolving business requirements. However, one of the challenges that developers face in attempting to build such Services is defining the exact Services that might be required by end users that will consume those Services. Indeed, accomplishing the goals of widespread application reuse has always been a challenge since in a truly loosely coupled environment the developer has little or no communication with the consumers of those application Services. RatchetSoft hopes to change the fundamental challenge of Service development and application reuse by providing a tool for developers called Ratchet-X that allows them to map user interface elements to Service interfaces. End users can then consume these Services without needing to communicate with the original application developer to meet their ongoing needs.