RIA: What is it good for?
This year there has been an explosion in Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks. The first major player to announce one was Adobe and its Apollo framework, which Richard covered back in March and I wrote about during ETech. Richard also wrote an explanatory post on Apollo.
Context & Ripple Effects
By mid-2007 the question of whether web apps should stay thin in the browser or go 'rich' on the desktop had hardened into a two-camp fight — Microsoft's platform gravity versus Adobe's Flash ubiquity, framed earlier this year in Microsoft, Adobe, and rich versus reach. Adobe moved first: after a public alpha in March built on Flash and Ajax, it has spent the spring detailing Apollo's own markup language, runtime, and graphics framework, enough that GigaOM was already sketching an Apollo vs. Firefox battle for control of the application container.
This Read/WriteWeb roundup lands amid that framework pile-up, and its syndicated echo on CNET under a 'Google Gears churns toward Microsoft' headline signals the field is wider than the Adobe-Microsoft binary. One disclosure colors the debate: the blogger behind one of the Apollo critiques had just taken a job at Adobe, a reminder of how entwined the analyst conversation already was with the vendors.
First-order effects
- Developers evaluating this year's RIA wave must now pick between runtimes rather than extend existing web stacks — Adobe's Apollo alpha is first to market, putting early mindshare and tooling decisions in Adobe's hands.
Second-order effects
- Google Gears' arrival, per the CNET pickup, forces Microsoft to defend the browser-desktop boundary on its own turf, while Mozilla's Firefox — cast as Apollo's rival by GigaOM in March — has to decide whether a third-party desktop runtime complements or cannibalizes the browser.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-runtimes keep multiplying outside the browser, distribution of applications shifts from URL-addressability to whichever runtime owns install, storage, and offline access — a structural hand-off of the web's open-access model to platform owners.
The trend: Web application development in 2007 is splitting off the browser into competing vendor-controlled runtimes, with each framework launch redrawing who owns the desktop-web boundary.