O’Reilly: Inside RIA

There still seems to be a battle to be had about the future of computing in the browser vs. on the desktop. With a little bit of terminology change, and a slightly different perspective, it becomes clear that these two environments for running software are co-evolving, not competing for attention.

I have been thinking about the current state of the "View Source" option that the web has so radically benefited from. With the Flash Player and it's radical success over the last ten years, it may be time to ask why we are so ready to part with the "View Source" command that we have become used to in the browser. For years we have all been focused on our creations in Flash, so stunning, and compelling has the work been that it's need to be freely available to the masses as source has certainly fallen to the wayside.

This platform released today provides an effective solution for slaying one dragon, but a much scarier dragon lurks atop the mountain I call form factor. The danger is in thinking that we have a platform for developing universal experiences, when the truth is, that we have a platform that provides us with a universal runtime to build experiences upon. Just because your code is cross-platform, doesn't mean that your experience is.

So if we are talking about supply and demand we have to define the two sides of the equation. The demand side is outside-in, it is the emergence of an "Experience Oriented Market" within a vertical. The supply side is inside-out, and it is called Design Maturity.

The reason I say "Whose Coat is this Jacket" is because if everyone uses the term application or website to describe everything, then it really means nothing at all. That gives us no basis on which to form judgment on whether or not deploying rich user interfaces makes sense. Without a hard definition of "true functionality", we are unequipped to create any kind of real distinction between the two terms to try and make sense of it all.

Recently, Jakob wrote a column titled "Web 2.0 Can Be Dangerous". This is another one of those columns designed to get people stirred up. It addresses some of the components of the Web 2.0 movement including: rich internet applications, social networking, mashups, and advertising based business models. He builds an argument that claims that companies should not get caught up in the hype surrounding Web 2.0 while working with their current web properties. They should instead focus on getting the fundamentals, or the Web 1.0 features perfect.

Almost everyone in the tech industry is familiar with the concept of an "Elevator Speech". You meet someone for the first time, they ask you what you do, and your job is to very quickly explain it. Who knows, it may be a potential client you're talking to, so you have to make sure what you say is precise, exciting, and positions you as an expert in their eyes.

There is a vision for the Rich Internet Applications out there in the industry, but now that many players are coming into the arena, that vision is blurring, and the concept ends up being anything anyone wants it to be.