With the release of the RIA Technology Study we commissioned from Sonata it is now clear that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that serve the diverse needs of Internet applications. These needs define a spectrum from simple B2C interfaces to the more complex highly visual interfaces of real-time enterprise dashboards.

We have created the following graphic to position the RIA technologies along a spectrum from B2C to B2E and B2B.

From the moment I first heard of Curl it was clear to me that it was uniquely suited for demanding enterprise applications. But all our evidence was anecdotal. Now with the release of the Sonata report we have actual numbers to support that positioning.

We have been working with Jeffrey Hammond at Forresterto validate this positioning. It was good to see Jeffrey's comments in the Redmond Developer News article by John Waters.

""Curl has positioned itself exclusively for enterprise organizations, and mainly for business-to-business RIA apps... the Curl RIA platform stacks up well against the competition"

Additionally we have been working with Ryan Stewart, ZDNet bloggerand Abobe RIA Evangelist help educate the market on the Benefits of RIA. We gave Ryan a preview of the Sonata report which he highlighted in this post.

One of the more interesting findings of the report is the trade-off between the size of the run time environment and the size of the application download. The flowing graphs show the RTE and application sizes.

While Ajax has no RTE it takes a heavy penalty with the largest application size. At the other end of the spectrum Curl's runtime is the largest at almost 8MB but using pCurl compression it has the smallest application size by a wide margin. This design trade-off further validates Ajax as the choice for simple B2C applications that can't tolerate a commitment to downloading a large RTE. While Curl is most appropriate for larger more complex B2E and B2B applications where downloading an RTE once is well worth the benefit in application performance and scale.

Richard

Richard, Jnan, and I got a lot out of the Office 2.0 Conference last week in San Francisco. As Richard has already reported, the RIA Technologies panel discussion that I moderated and Jnan represented Curl on was a great success based on the feedback I've received. I thought the conversation was quite lively and we were able to discuss a number of factors influencing the adoption of Rich Internet Applications in businesses in general and the enterprise in particular.

It's clear that adoption patterns are still in an early stage of development and that there are decidedly different attitudes and approaches in different markets and regions about how and when RIAs are appropriate solutions for businesses to consider. Here are a few key observations I took away from the panel and discussions with attendees and exhibitors at the event:

• The current focus on RIA adoption centers on providing a better user experience, gaining a competitive advantage by providing self-service solutions to customers, reducing cycle time in customer engagements, and reducing server loads and latency by offloading more application processing to the client PC.

• Online/offline capabilities are not yet a critical factor driving businesses towards RIA development. Most agree that this will become an increasingly important factor as more line-of-business applications move to the web but today it's more of a checklist feature than a go/no go decision factor.

• The consensus on the panel was that both a grassroots adoption by entities inside an organization and top-down process re-engineering mandate from corporate IT and management are required to drive broader adoption of RIAs in larger organizations. The now-classic examples of instant messaging and wireless infiltration and proliferation inside the firewall were repeatedly invoked by panel participants to suggest how RIA adoption might grow.

• In a similar vein, most agreed that Generation Y/Digital Natives/Millenials (pick your favorite label) entering the workforce in increasing numbers will increase pressures on IT and business management to web-enable more internal and customer-facing processes.

• There was general agreement that there is probably more RIA development and implementation going on in the enterprise than has been publicly documented. Organizations who see their use of RIAs as a competitive advantage are not likely to be interested in drawing a lot of public attention to these efforts in an effort to maintain that edge. So they promote the benefits directly to their internal and external customers but avoid making a lot of public disclosure about the value these initiatives are delivering.

• Interoperability and integration of services and data sources, driven by common standards, well-documented APIs, and an increasing willingness to use the open source model to promote community development, are more important than ever. Increased use of the browser as a delivery window for application functionality provides developers with the opportunity to build solutions that can be accessed on an increasingly broad range of devices and platforms.

Martin Heller, who profiled Curl 5.0 in a very favorable review I wrote about last week, has just posted a brief but excellent explanation of just what Rich Internet Applications are, where they fit in the overall development continuum, and where application development is headed. Here is the essence of how he describes what an RIA is and the challenges the technology, in a generic sense, is ideally suited to address:

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 executes on the remote server.

RIAs try to allocate resources to the most appropriate place. If the gating issue is the overall scalability of the application, then the designer of the RIA will run most of the CPU-intensive computations on the client. On the other hand, if the application uses a database intensively, then many actions will run on the server.

Many RIAs are written to accommodate intermittent connectivity. If such an app needs a database resource, a local database kicks in when the local computer disconnects from the Internet. When an Internet connection is reestablished, the application synchronizes the local database with the central database.

Perfect. As I've begun to help evangelize Curl in the blogging community and have been constructing my thoughts on how to best articulate why I think this approach represents an important hybridization of the polar extremes of fat client and web-based applications, I've touched on most of these points but nowhere near as eloquently or concisely. I encourage you to read the entire article and bookmark it for future reference and sharing with colleagues. I certainly have.

It was fun attending Gnomedex last week. I was there with Marc Orchantrepresenting Curl and reaching out to the blogger community to raise the awareness of Rich Internet Application technologies. This was Marc's first Gnomedexbut as a professional blogger it seemed he knew everyone there. Gnomedex was planned as the event we would out the news that Marc joined Curl to help build the Curl developer community and raise awareness of RIA technologies in the enterprise.

The last time I attended Gnomedex in 2004 the feature was the announcement of Microsoft getting on the RSS band wagon. Blogging was taking off big time. With Rubel and Siffry featured prominently in the BusinessWeek cover article, \\"Blogs Will Change Your Business.\\" There were 9 million blogs. This was "the wild frontier." Technorati and PubSub were the leading contenders for blog search.

Just 2 years later Gnomedex 7 had a decidedly different tone. Today PubSub imploded in a melt down that I witnessed first hand and Technorati is tracking over 70 million blogs.Now that you can make a living as a professional blogger, the conversation is turned from the "wild frontier" to "getting down to business." Marc's kids friends are always surprised to hear what he does for a living " you mean they pay you to blog." Now we have public voices we also have public exposure like never before with all the good and bad that comes with that. What happened to Kathy Sierra (one of my favorite bloggers) has become a real worry. Vanessa Fox's session generated a good discussion about privacy and safety on-line.

I also especially enjoyed Gregg Spiridellis talk about the history of JibJab and how their business model has been changing on a regular basis. Now they're into the personal cards market making entertaining user generated content. We got a great laugh as he featured Scoble and Pirillo in a Hawaiian number. Good fun. Here's my version.

As always Gnomedex-networking is the highlight. You can find new interesting ideas and get a pulse on the state of the blogosphere from those that shape it on the front lines. I had a great conversation with Ryan Stewartwho has been blogging on RIA for almost 2 years know. He recently joined Abobe and it was fun hearing of his adventures on the Adobe onAIR bus tour. He has seen a real increase in the RIA interest level over the last 4-6 months. We also talked about how the event driven publish-subscribe technologies like KnowNow have seen slow adoption. RIA's should be the interface of choice for real-time data driven applications. This is something Adobe is working to evangelize with their Flex Data Services.

Ryan thinks that bloggers are 6-9 months away from really understanding RIA. I think it may even be longer. What we notice with Curl's experience is that the US is at least 2 years behind Japan in the adoption of RIA. In fact in Japan they don't even think of it as RIA but rather as a means to end. The question is not "How can I use RIA to reduce TCO and get to new markets", but "How can I reduce my procurement time" or "How can I get my product to more distributors." Use of RIA technologies are only a means to reach their business goals. Hopefully the US enterprise RIA market will start to see growth in the next 6 months.

Richard

In a recent briefing with[ Ron Rogowski at Forrester Research|http://www.forrester.com/rb/search/results.jsp] the question of how RIA is changing the enterprise computing environment came up. Ron has been doing a lot of research on RIA but most of his work has focused on the B2C applications. This is primarily because these applications are readily accessible for analysis. Enterprise applications sit behind the firewall and aren't visible. Furthermore many enterprises regard their RIA implementations as their competitive advantage and as such are reluctant to talk about them.

With Curl's enterprise customers in Japan we have a unique perspective to see first hand how RIA is changing corporate applications.

The first thing we noticed is that Japan is about 2 years ahead of the US market in adopting RIA. I think there are 2 major reasons for this.

• Process Driven Society - In Japan a premium is placed on process and there is a substantial urgency to constantly improve and a built in rigor to measure the results. This plays directly to a key strength of RIAs - They improve UIs and make people more efficient.

• Complex Graphics Required - Right from the get go Japanese UIs require complex graphics even for simple communication. As a result there is a predisposition to create web applications that make use of complex graphics.

The Japanese have realized that they can deploy complex, data driven applications over the web and substantially lower their TCO, provide better usability and higher productivity.

In the US the incentive to move to RIAs are being driven more by the hype around Web2.0 and the fact that the Internet is increasingly being viewed as "the platform." This has created the expectation that all applications should be accessible from the web and certainly the popular SaaS model requires it.

I think there are two dynamics going on here.

• Migration of enterprise applications to the Web - This is reflective of Curl's customers in Japan. Most Curl implementations replaced complex client-server applications. These implementations substantially reduced TCO, increased reach and improved productivity

• Improvement of Web1.0 applications - The improvement of web applications with the use of Ajax or Adobe's Flex has caught the imagination of many web application developers in the US. Google maps and many of the new mash-ups are driving adoption of RIA in the US.

At Curl we have developed the following graphic to position the adoption of RIA into these different segments.

1. The first transition depicted by the graph (1) took place back in the late 1980's. This transition was from character applications that offered very simple interfaces and a reach about equal to the length of the connecting cable, to client-server applications that made use of bitmap graphics and a mouse to substantially improve usabilty and productivity. Windows applications became the mainstay of the enterprise but the TCO was high and the distribution limited.

2. The second transition was from client-server to web browser based applications. Web based applications increased the reach, lowered the TCO, but offered only the simplist of interfaces. In fact many enterprise applications in the mid 1990's had both a client-server version that was useful and web version that sucked.

3. Now we come to todays dynamic. What we notice with Web2.0, Ajax and other RIA platforms is the move from static, simple Web1.0 applications to more interactive dynamic Web2.0 applications.

4. In Japan, however, the movement is from complex client-server applications to the web. These applications are characterized by the need for complex data visualization of data sets in the hundreds of thousands. These are applications that were previously only possible as fat clients.

So from our experience in enterprise RIA we see corporations starting to realize that their client-server applications can now web enabled and still provide the complex data visualization they require. I'll speak more about the attributes of these applications in an upcoming post.

Richard