I never realised that the BoFs of 2000-2001 which were more open discussions than the mini-technical sessions of today were in fact “unconferences”

It was a butt-kicking good time though.

-James

I was one of the people involved in coining the phrase “RIA” at Macromedia in the early 2000s (along with a core group of Jeremy Allaire, Kevin Lynch, and Adam Berry if I recall. I am not not sure who first hit on the final coinage, it was the product of a series of discussions.).

Here is the thing: it had a very clear meaning *at the time* and was a clear contrast to the prevailing mass of applications on the web. Now that the entire web has evolved dramatically, the contrast is largely gone and the phrase is not less meaningful, but certainly less useful.

At the time, we were in a world of page based web apps. Applications that were using the page request model of the browser to deliver very limited interactivity and client side functionality, and led to frustrating repeated refreshes of the page to do anything. The iconic example we and many used at the time was the Broadmore hotel reservation site. As a Web 1.0 app, it was a long series of HTML pages just to complete a hotel reservation, and it suffered from all the problems of the day (eg, if one made an error and tried to go back, you lost all the info you had entered in the previous pages and had to start over.)

What we saw them do was create a single screen application with rich interactivity on the client, but still all of the benefits of being a web based application (nothing to install, back end connectivity for inventory and other data using XML, use of client side media/animation to guide the user, reachable through any browser, etc.) We really looked at this as the best of web applications and the best of desktop applications: rich connectivity, platform independence, no install, lightweight as well as rich client side logic and interactivity, ability to integrate rich media and communications. But we dropped the baggage of the page based metaphor that basically required a page refresh for everything and got beyond the layout/graphics/media constraints of HTML.

So I think the definition made quite a lot of sense, and it was I think a very valuable coinage to capture an emerging class of application that was radically better than the mainstream at the time.

Now, at that time, much of what I described as RIA could *theoretically* be done with DHTML (now called AJAX) but the reality is that it was not yet sufficiently browser independent and there was little uptake of it after the first burst (and abuse) of DHTML in the late 90s.

Fast forward to today. The term is less useful because it describes the mainstream. Today a large percentage (a majority?) of web applications are “single screen” and use AJAX techniques to update the screen without refreshing the page gratuitously and the major browsers and JavaScript libraries are sufficiently mature that it is quite possible to create platform/browser independent apps with AJAX. Similarly, the use of rich media, usually Flash, is widespread. Of course, over this 8 years, the Flash Platform approach has matured with richer frameworks (Flex..), tooling, components, messaging, and even richer media (H.264 video, for example). But the paradigm is still the same as we saw when we coined the phrase RIA, it just isn’t quite as “unique” and a contrast to the mainstream that it was. Debating the meaning of the phrase “RIA” has become kinda like debating the meaning of the phrase “application” because most are RIAs. So a more interesting debate (to me) would be: OK, so (a) how can we advance the state of the art to build/debug/maintain such applications rapidly and (b) what is the next major paradigm shift in a world where small screen internet connected non-PC devices out number PCs.

Cheers,

David
Adobe

James, the RedMonk unconferece content is solid because of the people who come to collaborate/argue with the 3 of you. I’d be surprised if newbies in 2008 didn’t show up in 2009.

Hmm…provide value and people come back. Novel idea

I am proud to say that the latest SAP designs are enormous strides forward from even relatively recent products, and that is a result of some very hard work from our design and product teams. The daunting thing is that I think the more we invest, the more we upskill, the harder we work, the more appreciation we gain for how poor man/machine interaction is and how difficult it is to produce a well designed application.

While Dain was spot-on that design was what is key, he was dead wrong when he went on to say that design is easy. To be fair, I had the same attitude 3 years ago when I left development. Having walked a while on the other side, it’s simply grim how poor our methods & tools are as an industry when it comes to design.