RIA

The combination of Flex and The Cloud is quickly becoming an IT and paradigm changing combination. Here are a number of recently published resources for learning more about this :

• An article I wrote has been published on the online Flash & Flex Developer’s Magazine: Flex and The Cloud: Is this really just Client/Server 2.0?
• I’ll be speaking on Thursday, February 18 2010 at the Denver Flex User Group about Flex and The Cloud
• The recording of a webinar I co-hosted on the new Salesforce.com Cloud platform for developers has been posted
• Jeff Douglas has posted a video walk through showing how to use the new Salesforce.com Flash Builder 4 extension for Flex + Cloud apps

Exciting stuff! Let me know what you think!

A few weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Expo in NY I co-presented The Best and Worst Practices Building RIAs with Josh Holmes. Some would say that Josh and I evangelize competitive technologies (Silverlight and Flex). So it’s really fun for us to come together and find common ground around building great software - no matter what technology is behind it. Here are the slides from our presentation. Let me know what you think.

The two major trends transforming software right now are Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Cloud Computing / Software as a Service (SaaS or PaaS). These trends are driven by two needs:

• Full client capabilities, which allow software to perform optimally and increase usability

  • • Easy deployment, which allows developers to focus on business needs instead of building infrastructure
    The combination of RIA and Cloud is the future of software because it provides full client capabilities and easy deployment. The chart below illustrates this in comparison to the other major software architectures (main-frame, client / server, and web).

<img src="http://www.jamesward.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/RIA.png" alt="RIA" title="RIA" width="600" height="370" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-1272" srcset="https://www.jamesward.com/uploads/2009/10/RIA.png 600w, https://www.jamesward.com/uploads/2009/10/RIA-300x185.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" />

In line with these trends Adobe and Salesforce.com [announced today][1] that they are working together to unite Rich Internet Applications and The Cloud. At the core of this announcement is a developer preview of the [Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com][2] tool. This tool enables developers to easily build intuitive user interfaces with Flex which connect to the Force.com cloud platform and Salesforce.com CRM data. These applications can be deployed either in the browser or on the desktop using Adobe AIR. When utilizing Adobe AIR, the applications can still function when users are disconnected. Later, when users reconnect, the changes are synchronized with Force.com using the LiveCycle Data Services synchronization engine.

Being able to connect Flex applications to Salesforce.com / Force.com has been possible (and easy) since I co-created what was originally called the [Flex Toolkit for Apex][3]. So while it has been possible to build Rich Cloud Applications for a few years, today's announcement is significant for a few reasons:

  * Adobe and Salesforce are now officially partnered together around Rich Cloud Applications
  * Much better, officially supported developer tooling
  * Much better offline data synchronization

It's really exciting to see how the vision of Rich Cloud Applications is becoming reality!

If you'd like to learn more or try out the new tooling check out these resources:

  * [Get the developer preview and watch video demos][2]
  * [Get inspired and see how it works][4]
  * [Watch a video walk-through][5]

Another great way to learn more is to sign up for a [Webinar / Tech Talk][6] that I will be co-presenting.

Let me know what you think about this exciting new partnership and developer tooling.

Matt Raible is a legend in the world of Java web applications. In the latest episode of Drunk on Software Jon Rose and I sit down with Matt, have a few beers, and talk geek stuff. Matt has a lot of great insight into where software is going. In the video we asked him what the future looks like for web frameworks. Matt’s response brought into question the future of component frameworks. Jon and I were pretty surprised by his response. You will have to watch the video to get the whole story. :) Let us know what you think.

It’s great to see the concept of Portable RIAs beginning to crop up in real world applications. The latest one I’ve seen is on ESPN - allowing the user to check out the latest March Madness updates from within a PDF. Check it out:

The current state of the economy has every business thinking about cost cutting and higher productivity. This is fueling significant growth in the Rich Internet Application space. There are numerous examples of businesses achieving substantial return on investment from RIAs. For instance, Allurent, a company that builds RIA E-Commerce solutions, created a better web shopping experience for Borders.com that resulted in 62% higher order conversion. Here is a great video that goes into more details about what they did:

I was recently able to be a guest on The Startup Success Podcast. I talked with Bob and Patrick about my usual topics: Rich Internet Applications, Flex, Adobe AIR, etc. It was a very enjoyable chat. Give it a listen and let me know what you think.

Last week I was able to be a guest speaker on the RIA Weekly podcast. In the episode Coté and I talked about RIAs in Portals, Flex and Open Source, and other various topics. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

At CodeMash 2009 I was able to participate in a panel discussion about Rich Internet Applications, Flex, Silverlight, and Ajax. The panel was moderated by Richard and Carl from the .NET Rocks! podcast. Also on the panel was Josh Holmes and Jesse Liberty from Microsoft and Leon Gersing. It was a fun panel - especially since we enjoyed some fine whiskey during it! But also because it’s great to see how we all have common goals - we all want software to be better no matter what the underlying technology is.

Update: I’ve posted another Portable RIA demo.

The web began as a platform for browsing, finding, and exchanging documents. Over the past ten years the web has moved beyond this document-centric role, and is now a platform for exchanging data. We typically refer to web sites used for data exchange as web applications. The next major evolution of the web is underway as web applications become more interactive and useful. The industry now refers to these next generation web applications as rich Internet applications or RIAs.