Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

Sri Kulkarni

Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications

Typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines ( Now part of browsers with HTML 5).

Examples of RIA frameworks include ◦ Curl, GWT, Adobe Flash/Adobe Flex/AIR, Java/JavaFX,

uniPaaS, Mozilla's XUL and Microsoft Silverlight Popular plug-in based frameworks are

1. Adbobe Flex (e.g. Mensa/VSX, Smith Barney)2. MicroSoft Silverlight3. JavaFX

Popular plug-in based frameworks are

What is RIA

Define an application interface using a set of pre-defined components (forms, buttons, and so on)

Arrange components into a user interface design Use styles and themes to define the visual design Add dynamic behavior (one part of the application

interacting with another, for example) Define and connect to data services as needed Build the source code into an SWF file that runs in

the Flash Player

Adobe Flex

Microsoft Silverlight is a web application framework, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Initially released as a video streaming plugin, later versions brought additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools. The current version, 3.0, was released on July 9, 2009.

It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Mobile 6 and Symbian (Series 60) phones, will likely become supported in 2010. A free software implementation named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, is available to bring compatible functionality to Linux, FreeBSD and other open source platforms.

MS SilverLight

JavaFX is a software platform for creating and delivering rich Internet applications that can run across wide variety of connected devices. The current release (JavaFX 1.2, June 2009) enables building applications for desktop, browser and mobile phones. TV set-top boxes, gaming consoles, Blu-ray players and other platforms are planned.

JavaFX is fully integrated with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) – JavaFX applications will run on any desktop and browser that runs the JRE and on top of mobile phones running Java ME.

To build JavaFX apps developers use a statically typed, declarative language called JavaFX Script.

On desktop, the current release supports Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS operating systems. Beginning with JavaFX 1.2 Sun has released beta-releases for Linux and OpenSolaris.

On mobile, JavaFX is capable of running on multiple mobile operating systems, including Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, and proprietary real-time operating systems.

Sun javaFX

HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML.

HTML5 is expected to be a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.

http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

HTML 5

Canvas and SVG◦ ScalableVector Graphics

Audio and Video tags Geo Location App Cache and Database Web Workers Some others

◦ Drag and drop◦ Cross domain / cross document messages◦ RTE ◦ Ajax navigation history

HTML 5 features

SVG canvas

Has scene DOM (SVG DOM, though)

Single HTML element, rendering script-driven

Deals in shapes Deals in pixels

Somewhat hard to mix with HTML (not XHTML)

Behaves like an image in both

Event handling easy Event handling hard

HTML 5: SVG and Canvas

http://people.mozilla.com/~vladimir/xtech2006/http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/http://htmlfive.appspot.com/static/gifter.html

http://hypem.com/ <audio src="path_to_file.ogg"></audio> http://www.youtube.com/html5 ( YouTube mockup using HTML5) http://www.skierpage.com/moz_bugs/test_audio_video_tags.html

HTML 5: Audio and Video tags

CRM , Social s/w, Ads, Photos and so on … will have different geolocation dimension

Maps.google.com take a look in Firefox Too slow, Too constrained, Too fuzzy Browsers are now location enabled

HTML 5: Geo Location

Add local cache for files to make available Also you can access data with database

scripts ( insert into ….. )

HTML 5: Database and App Cache – Offline access

Constraint of running javascript due to resources is solved by this

Web Worker are background javascript processes

Example of prime number finding JavaScript

HTML 5: Web Workers

HTML 5 support