RIAs Methods And Techniques

JavaScript
It is the first major client side language technology that has the ability to run code and installed on several major of web clients. Earlier its uses were relatively limited but the development in DHTML makes possible to piece together an RIA system without using unified client-side solution. Ajax, the advance tool of Java Script becomes more prominent technique to develop RIA. Google is using this tool on the mass scale to develop its one of the most popular software Gmail and Google maps. Despite of this it is not so easy to create a large application in this framework. Several other different technologies have to include with efficiency. For making process easier several open source Ajax Frameworks have been developed along with commercial frameworks.

Adobe Flash
This is another major tool to develop RIA as this technology is cross-platform and quite powerful to create an application user interface. Flash user interface can be compiled by MXML (a XML based interface description language), through using Adobe Flex tool. Adobe is currently working on providing a more powerful platform with the product Adobe AIR, a combo technology of HTMLs (including Ajax applications) Flash player based applications and PDFs.

OpenLaszlo
OpenLaszlo is an open source rich Internet application framework, which was developed by Laszlo Systems Inc.. The OpenLaszlo server

compiles programs from LZX language (a mixture of XML tags and JavaScript) into either DHTML (commonly known as AJAX now) or Adobe Flash bytecode. At present it is upporting Flash7 and Flash8. OpenLaszlo is the only rich Internet application platform, which can compile two different runtimes of same code base.

Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight
Microsoft has launched Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) with .NET 3.0 Framework that provides a way to build single-platform applications having some similarities to RIAs that uses XAML and programming languages like C# and Visual Basic. Besides this, Microsoft has announced to launch Silverlight that will provide a subset of WPF functionality on devices and other platforms.

ActiveX Controls
Inclusion of ActiveX controls into HTML is a very powerful mean to develop rich Internet applications, but they have no guarantee of running it on Internet Explorer properly. Many times they can break the sandbox model. This

makes it a suitable tool to target to manufacture computer viruses and malware.

Curl 5.0, Rebol 2.6 and Seaside for Smalltalk
There are three alternatives of Java and the JVM are available in the RIA developing world. These are: Curl, Rebol and Smalltalk. All these are abstract machines that are available in various forms. Curl facilitates Client-side
persistent data while Rebol does not need a browser and Seaside uses a minor extension to Smalltalk to provide a much richer web experience for Smalltalk. All three alternatives are far more mature than more familiar options and are as old or older than Java and the JVM.

Java applications
Java based Rich Internet Applications can be launched from within the browser or as free Standing applications through Java Web Start. Java RIAs can perform full-fledged functionality of Java include 2D & 3D graphics, and off-line capabilities, but at the cost of delayed startup. Some useful frameworks for Java RIAs are XUI,
Swixml, or Canoo’s thin Swing-approach, UltraLightClient.

User Interface languages
New user interface markup language can be used in RIAs as an alternative to HTML/XHTML. RIA’s user interfaces may also be richer via using scriptable Scalable Vector Graphics (SVL) as well as SMIL Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL). Though all browsers do not support native SVG rendering yet.