RIA Wars - Game On

"Tech Titans' Web Battle" - The headline of an article by Brandon Bailey in today's Mercury proclaims as news the story I've been telling for 2 years now - The war for dominance of the next desktop is on. The big boys have realized it for a while now and the battle lines have been drawn within the new RIA platform category. The fact that this story has caught the attention of the Merc is further proof the fight is going mainstream.

Gartner's recent Market focus report on RIA and Forrester's planned wave are further evidence the market is heating up and that RIA is a legitimate category.

We are now seeing a class of applications that are going beyond the simple dynamic interactivity possible through Ajax and into complex standalone desktop applications. With the more sophisticated RIA platforms it is now possible to replace client-server applications with much lower cost web applications.

Of course the Mercury article only mentions the titan products: Adobe's Flash/AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX but notes:

"analysts say it's unlikely that one company will dominate this field — at least not in the near future. But the market is huge"

This leaves plenty of room for lesser known platforms like Curl's Enterprise RIA to position itself as successfully meeting the needs of enterprise class applications.

Indeed many of Curl's over 400 customers found Curl only after trying and failing with Ajax or Flash. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement. Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980’s and 1990’s building client-server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows.

2009 should be a defining year for RIA platforms as more and more enterprises look to replace and modernize their old client server applications with web applications.

Tour of California - Tracker

I've been watching the Amgen Tour of California on TourTracker. While there have been some bugs with this complex Flash application overall the experience has been great. Yesterday my friends were in Santa Cruz waiting to see the race pass by and I was alerting them with status via SMS. I felt like I was Chloe running "command central" at 24. I even saw my friends in the live video as the race whizzed by them.

Below is a screen shot of the application which features live video and live telemetry including time, distance, speed and grade and well as GPS tracking in map and profile views. Very cool.

RIA Wars: Microsoft vs Adobe

Elizabeth Montalbano at InfoWorld reports on the RIA war going on between Microsoft and Adobe.

Microsoft's Tim Sneath lashed out at Adobe over Silverlight comments made by Mark Garrett at Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2009 in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Garrett claimed that adoption of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA technology has fizzled. But Sneath countered in a recent post.

"Similarly, the idea that Silverlight is in anything other than rude health is more to do with what Adobe would like to be the case, rather than what actually is the case. The suggestion that “Silverlight adoption has fizzled out in the last 6-9 months” is pretty risible, in fact. For starters, Silverlight 2 shipped four months ago, and in just the first month of its availability, we saw over 100 million successful installations just on consumer machines. That doesn’t sound like “fizzling out” to me – in fact, it makes Garrett’s comments seem as if he’s living in a fantasy world."

Yes indeed - Fantasy-World - game on! With this economy we've all been living in a fantasy world.

2008 RIA Review in eWeek

Jim Rapoza of eWeek summarizes the year for RIA Platforms. The hardcopy eWeek edition of the story featured the results of the RIA Survey conducted at Inside RIA by ORielly. We were interested to note Curl came in second with 16.1% responding that Curl was next on their list to use.