Your company has decided to take the plunge, drink the Kool-Aid, buy the ranch and go whole-hog RIA. This thought probably makes you break into a cold sweat. There's so much breathy excitement surrounding Web 2.0 and rich internet applications today that it's difficult to separate the hype from the reality: so many terms to decipher (mash-ups, moblogs, long tail), technologies to consider (AJAX, XML, Ruby on Rails) and words to misspell (flickr, digg, Payloadz). Although there's definitely a hype factor in play here, the reality is that RIAs are changing the web, in my opinion for the better.
Rich internet applications are simply everywhere, and on the tips of everyone's tongue these days. There's a great groundswell of interest in moving the online experience away from what is known as "brochure-ware" (read-only, top-down, anti-interactive websites) to sites that let folks interact, manipulate and contribute, result in an experience that's a lot more compelling and seriously fun.
In this chapter I'd like to walk you through the basics of RIAs and Web 2.0, and talk about the differences in both technology and interaction from what we've traditionally seen on the web. Understanding these differences and what's involved to get an RIA up and running will help you to understand how far down the RIA road you should go.
1.1 Qu'est-ce que c'est RIA?
The term "rich internet application" covers a lot of ground, and has very fuzzy borders. In this territory lives a variety of application types and technologies, with varying sizes, complexities and levels of interactivity. As if this weren't vague enough, RIA means different things to different people. For example, some companies may implement a rich internet application that adds power and robustness to the backend but has no net effect on the user experience, while for others adding "richness" may be primarily focused on the user experience, resulting in a UI paint job with no changes under the hood.
