Enterprises are looking to exploit the web as a platform for their business applications. This will be a natural progression from the client-server model, the dominant architecture for last 15 years or so.  There are two reasons behind this trend.

- First, the web as an ubiquitous platform has seen a lot of activity in the consumer space, with the success of Google applications, Google Maps, Flickr, Youtube, etc. Industry experts call this Web 2.0. It's natural for enterprises to explore how such technologies can be adopted for the enterprise.

- Second, use of the web platform over client-server has great economic advantages. It lowers the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). It seems clear that one immediate area to bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise is the RIA - improve the user experience and lower the cost. This is proven by numerous examples of Curl's wide use in Japan.

So, in order to evaluate RIA technology, what questions should companies ask the RIA vendor?  Here are just ten such sample questions. There are more.

1. Do you have enough functionality for creating dashboards for BI applications?

2. Can you construct transactional stateful applications, much like what we have in client-server today?

3. Do you provide functions such as drill-down, mouse-over pop-ups, and rich library of charts and graphs?

4. Do you have just-in-time compilation at the client for super-fast performance? Otherwise, how do you minimize latency from the roundtrip's?

5. Can you run these applications offline, for subsequent sync. when connected? What's your data-persistence approach at the client?

6. Do you have high-class IDE support for fast programmer productivity?

7. Do you provide scalability (no performance degradation with growth in users and workload)?

8. Do you provide enterprise-class security (sandbox, secure access to resources,...)?

9.  Can you handle large volume of data with good performance (100K records processed at the client-side)?

10. Can you fit into the back-end ecosystem such as J2EE, Oracle, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, etc.?

Answers to such questions will be critical for enterprises to pick the right vendor.