2008 the year of Rich Internet Applications?

There is an awful lot of hype about Rich Internet Applications (RIA) at the moment, and it is one of the 'big' competitive battlegrounds between Adobe and Microsoft. I think that the RIA is one of the most exciting technologies in development at the moment and we'll start to see some rich web sites this year that go beyond Flash games or movies.

There are two opposing technologies on the one hand we've got Flash, now owned and developed by Adobe with a huge installed user base thanks to the fact that it has been around so long and many sites (especially media sites) have a Flash animation somewhere. But not to be outdone Microsoft released Silverlight last year, at the moment it's not up to much beyond streaming a movie or the animation that we've put on our home page, but the next few months will see the release of version 2.

Silverlight 2.0 will be a watershed, it will add the ability to write scripts in languages other than Javascript thanks to the introduction of an exciting technology called the Dynamic Language Runtime. What that means is that developers will be able to write the scripts in languages such as C#, creating the possiblity of RIAs being created by the vast army of developers that use Microsofts .Net platform.

Adobe haven't been standing still (who would with Microsoft intent on entering your marketplace), they have created a toolset called Flex. Now I'm not an expert but it's my understanding that Flex allows a Flash application to 'talk' to a back end server so that it can retrieve data, allowing the application to load data dynamically in response to user selections without having to reload the web page (an important part of what makes an RIA an RIA). It's something that Silverlight 2 will also be able to do, so Flex gives Flash developers a similar toolset, with the added advantage that it's already released. I've also read that Adobe is to make Flex open source, which is an interesting move and will certainly be popular in some quarters.

I'm looking forward to seeing the next generation of Internet Applications and I hope that they will indeed be rich interactive experiences taking things beyond the tedious load/click/reload of the HTML page. As a Microsoft developer I'm looking forward to the release of Silverlight 2, and am eagerly awaiting the release of the beta which is due soon. I will certainly be looking at how I can use it to improve both our own web site and those of our clients!