Recently Kelly Emo, SOA Product Marketing Manager at HP Software wrote  in her post "Is your SOA in Action? Four ways to keep it that way.."   One element she offers in her "Obvious Insite # 3" is to use your SOA governance to drive adoption of new technologies such as RIA and Cloud Computing.

Last week we presented a review of the implementation of the Curl eyeDecide application to Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester.  I have posted the presentation here.

Presenting were Doug Mcrae and John Chisholm (Cheese) from Curl and Juhan Sonin from Involution Studios.

As a developer himself, I think Jeffery enjoyed hearing from the people who actually did the work.  I'm sure most of his days as an analyst are filled with discussion of trends and features rather actual design and coding techniques.

Curl eyeDecide was a team effort between Curl and Involution Studios, a top application UI design firm.  The complete team included Juhan from Involution and Doug and Cheese from Curl. It took 6 months from conception to press release that included 4 months of implementation.  That amounted to 30 work weeks and resulted in 20K lines of code.

The development cycle was collaborative and iterative and featured Curl's ability to code and deploy with a total of 50 distinct releases. The development started with connectivity to the data and the UI design was driven by the actual user experience of the testers at each release.

Some key learnings were that design and development should occur over the life of the project in an iterative cycle.  Additionally professional graphic and UI design matters and having Juhan involved in developing not only the looks but the user experience from the beginning was paramount.   Another important lesson is to clearly understand the data, its values and what people will want to do early in the process.

You can get the complete eyeDecide application in source form here.

Building web applications is where it's at.  65% of new custom applications are Web-apps accoording to Forrester's survery of software decision makers in North America and Europe.  It's also interesting to note that there are still a lot (second most at 47%) of Client-server applications in play.  Those folks should seriously look at desktop RIA's such as Curl as a better alternative.  See the attached chart.

For that last 2 years we have been tagging interesting RIA related

content using Delicious.  Our tag cloud which you can find under

the username CurlTech now has over 1,400 bookmarks. 

As such  it is a collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to

the market and technology trends.  I thought it would be useful to share

the content we tag weekly as itserves as a great bibliography for those doing

research on RIA.

We have been categorizing the content we find into three major groups:

• Business case for RIA

• Technology Comparisons

• RIA User Interfaces

Here is this weeks round up. . 

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on \\\\\"The Current and Future State of RIA\\\\\"

Impact

By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

InfoQ has just conducted a Virtual Panel on “The Current and Future State

of RIA” featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and

well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java,

Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of

questions relating to whether RIA technologies have “made it”, what the

optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications

will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the

various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!

Forrester

By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now

time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to

include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription

pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor

lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008

Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in

December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions.

The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts

across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn

ZDNet

By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small

article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding

to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the

Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage

digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing

InfoQ

By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA

plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by

Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9

Inside RIA.com

By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of

visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released,

Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk

on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the

Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link

Info World

By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2

SD Times

By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's

future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad

overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that

series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source

Dr. Dobb's Journal

By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing

enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun

loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register

By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated:Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is

again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups

for the latest update to enterprise Java.

"Tech Titans' Web Battle" - The headline of an article by Brandon Bailey in today's Mercury proclaims as news the story we've been telling for 2 years now - The war for dominance of the next desktop is on. The big boys have realized it for a while now and the battle lines have been drawn within the new RIA platform category. The fact that this story has caught the attention of the Merc is further proof the fight is going mainstream. Gartner's recent Market focus report on RIA and Forrester's planned wave are further evidence the market is heating up and that RIA is a legitimate category. We are now seeing a class of applications that are going beyond the simple dynamic interactivity possible through Ajax and into complex standalone desktop applications. With the more sophisticated RIA platforms it is now possible to replace client-server applications with much lower cost web applications. Of course the Mercury article only mentions the titan products: Adobe's Flash/AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX but notes:

"analysts say it's unlikely that one company will dominate this field — at least not in the near future. But the market is huge"

Indeed many of our over 400 customers found us only after trying and failing with Ajax or Flash. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement.  Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980’s and 1990’s building client-server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows.

2009 should be a defining year for RIA platforms as more and more enterprises look to replace and modernize their old client server applications with web applications.

Given the hard economic times, enterprises are tight on their IT spending. However, anything that can yield cost savings has become attractive. One such area is switching from antiquated client-server applications to a web based architecture, much like what our Japanese customers have done. We are calling that Application Modernization. Richard Treadway has written a blog post on this subject, showing the business case and great savings.

Recently I was asked by SiliconIndia magazine ( a Bay Area publication) to write an article on application modernization for the enterprise. This is just published in the February issue.

You can see the article here.

I just listened to Michael Cote of RedMonk and Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart’s most recent podcast on RIAWeekly.com (Podcast #38) which addresses the Curl CDK-DS announcement at the 16:00 mark.

In the podcast, Michael and Ryan directly quote the CDK-DS press release and talk about Ryan's ZDNet blog post which mentions Curl on The Universal Desktop(thanks Michael and Ryan). The Curl announcement later spurns a much longer discussion about the practical uses of AMF and the debate between binary and plain text coding.

It is great to see Curl and AMF getting this level of attention which I think will continue to grow as more podcasts and articles are being developed.  I'll continue to provide alerts when new coverage comes out!

I just attended AjaxWorld 2008 in San Jose, California. The theme of this conference was "2008: Decision Year for RIAs". Here is a quick summary.

• The first day keynote was by Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. Scott manages the development platforms including Silverlight. He gave several demos. The first one showed ASP .Net MVC (Model View Controller), JQuery, and Visual Studio 2008. The second demo was Silverlight and RIA-based development. Silverlight claims cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in. The Linux version is done with Novell. Most of the examples were on video streaming at sites such as NBC Olympics, the DNC (Democratic National Convention). He claimed the NBC Olympics had 70 million streams in 14 day period. AOL mail was another example using Silverlight. Some SAP front-ends are now using Silverlight. He claimed one of every four PC's now run Silverlight, kind of hard to believe, specially when Silverlight Release 2 was launched lat week. I wrote a response to a blog post on this. Microsoft deserves credit for "adaptive streaming" on varieties of line speeds ranging from 250 kbps to 2 Mbps. They clearly focus on beating Adobe's Flash player in video streaming. The business application part of Silverlight is weak on examples and functions, but high on claims. Silverlight claims multi-language support like C#, VB, Python. They claim rich query of data and local caching. The download is 4.6 MB and everything fits in that (includes 100s of built-in controls). For example, they have HTML API for programming pure HTML apps. All functions like calendaring have skinnable controls. Visual Studio is their IDE. The combination of VS 2008 and Microsoft Expression addresses the designer+developer community.

• Matt Quinlan from Appcelerator stared by saying "users may times don't now what they want. If Ford would have asked users what they wanted, they would have a said 'a faster horse'". Appcelerator provides a framework to speed up Ajax development. It provides a higher order expression language that generates Javascript. He said Javascript is "mountains of code" and pointed out that Google Map has 6535 lines of Javascript code. He derided Javascript as tedious, error-prone, boiler-plate stuff. It was interesting that many presenters showed Ajax frameworks to speed of development.

• Oracle made a presence this time. They showed their existing tools such as JDeveloepr and ADF (Application Development Framework) all using some new technology. It's "old wine in a new bottle". There is no front-end client-centric RIA story. They are from a Java server-centric culture and are sticking to that.

• Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch presented on day 3 early (poor audience) and I missed that, but supect he glorified Adobe Flex and AIR.

• Curl got good visibility.  I presented on first day a session titled  "RIA - Real Examples and Lessons Learnt", where four concrete customer examples were described, showing benefits of using Curl. Then Richard and I gave an interview to Sys-Con TV (not published yet). I also participated at a power panel yesterday on the subject "How are RIAs benefiting the bottom line?" You can see the other participants including last minute addition of Adobe (James Ward). Our simple booth was busy with many visitors getting a demo of Curl from the expert hands of Richard.

This AjaxWorld had several hundred people (my guess - 400), many did

not show up due to the harsh economic condition prevailing now.