Simon Morris's Blog

September 2007 Archives

Why Rich Internet Apps Will Fail

Did the title grab your attention? Good.

Those of you who have occasion to read my recent cognitive meanderings will know I'm a big advocate of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), specifically those of the neo-desktop kind (I never realised just how useful those terms would be!) So why am I turning against RIAs now?

Rest assured, I'm not. But any sensible advocate for a cause should spend a reasonable amount of time analysing said cause's deficiencies. And this is precisely what I intend to do here — picking just three issues from the various niggles and uncertainties I've identified while pondering the future of the RIA. I've chosen these three not only because are they important, but my programming 'spider sense' tells me they are solvable, given sufficient community effort.

A word of warning: as I write I have in mind the neo-desktop view of RIAs, these being applications written in traditional desktop APIs (Swing, AWT, etc, and recently JavaFX) which are not tied to a physical computer but arrive on-demand just like a web page, presumably by means of a URL (think 'WebStart'!) But many of the below criticisms are equally valid for Ajax-based RIAs, like GMail and Google Docs.

So let us kick off with problem number one...

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