We are starting to see increasing awareness of Curl as a serious RIA alternative to Adobe's Flex/AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Check this post from Paula Rooney today. First Martin Heller's excellent description of a good RIA delivered an wide-angle view of what a true Rich Internet Application should be. When we address the enterprise space, where serious mission-critical applications must be delivered via the web (instead of the traditional client-server platform of yesteryears), basic issues of scalability, reliability, security, and speed must be addressed.

Then there is the issue of programmer productivity and agile development. Having to deal with multiple islands of technology (Javascript or Actionscript, CSS, DOM, MXML, computational language like C# for serious OO programming, etc.) to construct a web-based application is highly non-trivial. Many Ajax users have to search for 3rd. party tools for charting and controls. The programming burden tends to be heavy.

As Web 2.0 gets increased use in the consumer space, enterprises must start looking at the broader issue of total application construction and delivery on the web platform. Just doing some tagging and mashups as an entry point is interesting but it is like a "solution looking for a problem". The challenge is also for packaged application providers such as SAP and Oracle to shift gear and convert their traditional client-server architectures to new web-based delivery. The same comment applies to BI vendors (e.g. Business Objects, Cognos, SAS, etc.) as well.

Curl's successful use by 300 enterprise-scale customers in Japan and Korea is a testimony to its strength as an enterprise-ready platform for RIA.

So ISV's, wake up and take a look at Curl as the oxygen to enable your switch to the web.

Over the last 6 months we have been educating the US market on the benefits of RIAs. In talking to IT organizations, ISVs, VARs and SIs it has become apparent that there is very little information about the benefits of RIAs to the enterprise.

In order to help the RIA cause we have created the RIA Knowledge Center. The RIA Knowledge Center is a place for information about RIA technologies and the business benefits they drive. In the spirit of "a rising tide helps all boats" it is our intent that the Knowledge center be as vendor neutral as possible. The repository will feature information about the deployment of RIA solutions and include podcasts, whitepapers, analyst reports and articles.

Additionally over the last 9 months we have been tagging the Internet and blogosphere for all things RIA. Some far we have created over 280 relevant RIA tags. You can see the complete set of tags here.

The Knowledge Center information is organized into 4 categories.

• The Business Case for RIA - These articles and reports focus on how the enterprises are measuring the benefits of RIA. Over the next several months we will be working with Forrester to provide more detailed studies on the ROI for enterprise RIA. Today you will find Ron Rogowski's report on \\"The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications.\\" (Note that the Forrester Reports that we are paying to distribute and valued at $379 do require registration)
• RIA User Interfaces - Much of the benefit of RIA is derived from improved user interfaces and is critical in measuring the RIA benefit. Reports in here focus on how improved user experience can have a direct impact on both top and bottom line of the your business.
• Technology Comparisons - There are a lot of RIA technologies and platforms available today. How to make sense of it all? In this section we will explore the benefits and challenges of each of the major alternatives. Today we announced the release of a detailed study performed by Sonata that compares Ajax, Flex and Curl.
• Use Case Scenarios - To date there have been very few documented enterprise RIA use cases. Curl has over 300 enterprise customers in Japan including Sony, Panasonic and NTT Communications. Over the next serveral months we will be providing the details of these deployments and how the benefits have been measured.

Richard

It has been a busy first day at Office 2.0. Marc, Jnan and I are here to represent Curl's Platform as an alternative to other more well know RIA alternatives such as Adobe's Flex.

Marc moderated a panel that explored the state of RIA adoption by enterprises in the
market.

Representing the different RIA technologies were Peter Armstrong for Ruby, Kevin Hakman for Tibco, Ryan Stewart for Abobe, David Tempkin for Laszlo and of course our own Jnan Dash representing Curl.

Marc did a great job moderating and got a lively discussion going.

Marc started the discussion by putting out a definition of RIA from Martin Heller at InfoWorld.

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically launches from the remote server.

All agreed with the point that it's hard to get enterprises to talk about applications behind the firewall. No one wants to give away their competitive differentiation.

Jnan pointed out an insight we got from our recent meeting with Accenture. As I have notedthe adoption of RIA in Japan seems to be a couple of years ahead of the US. What the folks at Accenture pointed out is that Japan is much more prone to do in house IT development. This has lead them to implement solutions using RIA directly to satisfy business imperatives. In the US market IT is much more likely to choose packaged software over in house IT development. This means that RIA adoption will be driven by ISVs and to this point ISVs have not felt the competitive pressure to cause them to create better products through the deployment of RIA.

See also the post on the panel at Blognation by Tris Hussey

See also my photos of the panel discussion here.

Richard