Listen to Episode 02 - Ben Forta on the History of RIA.
In this episode of ria.wiresidechat.com, Mike and Josh catch up with Ben Forta to talk about the history of RIA. Ben is the original evangelist from Adobe and has seen the entire history of RIA. He is now the Director of Platform Evangelism.
First, Ben lays down his definition of RIA. This was an interesting conversation as even this the question was a little bit of a walk down memory lane the term RIA (Rich Internet Applications) has started to become main stream and he's finding that he's not having to explain it to everyone the way that he did in the past.
One of the very important things that Ben talks about is the difference between Web Sites or traditional Web Applications and RIAs. One of the key differences is that traditional sites and applications are typically loosely coupled collections of pages that happen to work together whereas a RIA is a single application that has lots of interactions without having to refresh the entire screen. Instead they are leveraging services to interact with the server.
Next we talked about the barriers to adoption in the enterprise. The great news there is that over the past year or so, the momentum has really picked up in the RIA space across the board. The issue here is that one of the bigger issues is that there are not enough people to get the work done sometimes.
One of the things that all three of us, Mike, Ben and Josh, agree on is that one of the major bad practices when building RIAs is treating thinking like a traditional web developer. It's actually easier sometimes for desktop or old school client/server developers to get into RIA than it is for an HTML/CSS/JavaScript developer.
Ben is very excited about the future as he is starting to see a ton of new applications and
Finally Ben talks about how to get started.
The first thing that you have to do is pick a technology and go with it. It doesn't really matter which one - obviously Ben wants you doing Flex.
The second part is that you really need to learn back ends. You really need to understand the server side technologies and how to build them successfully. The front end technologies only work as well as the server side that supports them.
The third thing is that you need to get heavily engaged in the community. There are fantastic communities out there that will give you a ton of support. But these only work if you're engaged.
Links:
Ben Forta - http://www.forta.com/
Adobe - http://www.adobe.com/
Google Maps - http://maps.google.com/
Line Rider - http://linerider.com/
Fantastic Contraption - http://www.fantasticcontraption.com/
Mike's Blog: http://blogs.digitalprimates.net/codeSlinger/
Josh's Blog: http://www.joshholmes.com