Next 5 Years In Rich Internet Application Development

By Author: Harry Barter
Total Articles: 21
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Increasing popularity of rich internet applications has made it compulsory for all of us to think what it holds for us in future. Will all the products used for Rich internet applications development survive the cut throat competition or only a few will be seen in future. What changes we can expect in the present and future platforms for RIA solutions development. And lastly we need to think of how RIA will benefit companies.

To decide the best RIA development platform for future will not be a difficult task when we have adobes Flash Player in front of us. It is scalable to the highest level and has reached a version level of 10 starting from infancy. This is a fact enough to prove it is admired by all and holds a promising future for rich internet applications in its features. It provides strong support for designers, has a rapid development process, includes media formats and is cross platform compatible.

Though Adobe tops the list of best RIA platform and has been in use since years there is no certainty it will ...
... be there forever with computer giants trying their best to wear the crown. Currently though Microsoft is focusing on improving internet explorer we can expect it to come up with a RIA platform much advanced than Silverlight in future. AJAX is also a good competitor to Adobe's Flash but lacks scalability and is not compatible with all browsers and computers. Developing rich internet applications using AJAX is often time consuming for developers.

If we are to think of future technologies for rich internet application development then it would be apt to say almost all technologies that prevail at the moment are sufficient to satisfy the needs of present day people. Hence in present day it is not about creating better platform but about using the potential of all the available platforms to the maximum. Efforts can be made to increase the features of the existing platforms by adding features which would enhance development practices, measurement, 3D performance and componentization.

Customers have always wanted more from their RIA applications and the latest demand is support for 3D images and videos. 3D can make the application even more useful by beautifying virtual worlds, configurations and navigational systems. However this should be done very consciously as too futuristic or complicated applications are not liked by users.

From the time Flash was introduced to today we have seen it growing to improve its performance at each stage but still this is not the end to it, still there are many improvements the platform can adopt. Hardware acceleration can help improve Flash for rich internet development but that is not the solution to all online applications. In fact it can also lose on the compatibility side. Future for RIAs is providing a compatible and functional platform.

The languages used for rich internet application development need to be less complicated to facilitate development of sophisticated applications. This can be done by including the core features of Java and C++ to create applications which are easy to modify, scalable to large extent and simple to use. Tools to measure RIA solutions lack flexibility and accuracy, more research needs to be undertaken in this area to develop much better applications. Connectivity is another issue that needs our attention for developing RIA applications. The need for the future will be to develop applications which can work easily on a variety of devices.

Rich internet applications developed by iFlexweb have been immensely useful to the clients and their customers. They are developed using the latest technology as requested by clients.