Rich Internet applicaitons « Impact: a blog by Integration New Media (INM)

Posts Tagged ‘Rich Internet applicaitons’

The Year to Come – Looking Forward

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

In my last post, I took a moment to look back over the past year to see what changed. After looking back, it’s time now to look forward and predict what will happen over the year to come.

What’s in store over the next 12 months? Well, I see a number of big changes brewing on a few different fronts:

Cloud Computing/SaaS – We’ve written about this topic for the past year, and it seems to really be gaining traction over the last few months. Enterprises are embracing hosted services and software as a service (SaaS) as a way to become more responsive and to focus energies on core business. They will come to realize that entrusting some data and control to an SaaS is bliss as SaaS’ economy of scale allows for a level of security and reliability beyond what a modest in-house IT team can deliver. I predict that we will see greater acceptance of this in the coming year and will see many enterprises openly embrace SaaS for core business applications.
RIAs – Rich Internet applications have been one of the most popular topics in tech media this year. Over the next year, I predict that we will start to see a shift away from general RIAs and toward different categories of solutions such as Rich eCommerce, Rich BI, etc…. I also think that there will be big advances in the tools used to create RIAs. We’ve already seem previews of Thermo, but I suspect that this won’t be the only solution bridging the gap between developer and designer. The official launch of Silverlight 2.0 should add some much needed competition in the rich web content space. RIAs will also migrate deeper into the enterprise, with adoption expanding beyond B2C applications. RIAs will be pivotal for internal enterprise applications, as well as B2B.
Mobile – With nearly double the growth last year in mobile browsing, I predict that we are getting close to a big change in the way users interact with their mobile devices. This change will vastly be driven by better user interfaces and enhanced usability, but also by better display and battery technologies. Context-sensitive interactions (based on location, time of day, usage pattern, ambient attributes, etc.) will be a very hot topic.

So far it’s shaping up to be an exciting next 12 months. What do you think is in store? We welcome your comments and predictions.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Mobile, RIAs, Rich Internet applicaitons, SaaS
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

One Year Later – Looking Back over the Last 12 Months

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

In preparing for the one year anniversary of Impact, I decided to write two posts – this one, which looks back over what’s happened in the past year, and a second post which will go up tomorrow that will look forward to what we can expect in the coming twelve months.

Since July 2007, there have been a number of big changes in our space. Here are my thoughts and comments on a few of the key ones:

RIAs – This was a banner year for progress on the RIA front. Adoption catapulted forward, new tools and technologies like Adobe AIR, and Silverlight were introduced, barriers were broken in terms of content indexing, and many new tools for development were introduced. We also started to see RIAs adopted by enterprise for mission critical business applications like dashboards. The improved user experience and productivity benefits are being recognized and embraced by early adopters.
SaaS – In the past year, there has been a huge increase in acceptance of SaaS by enterprises and their users. Decision makers are starting to realize that flying from New York to London does not require the purchase of an aircraft, but just the “licensing” of a seat for the duration of the flight. We’ve even seen the emergence of PaaS.
Mobile – Few can doubt the impact of the iPhone, but it alone is not responsible for the growth in mobile browsing. According to AdMob, the number of internet web users in the US grew by 10 million, to reach 40 million, and mobile web usage has grown by over 100% in the past year.

On a more personal note, we’ve seen many changes here at INM as well. Over the past year, we’ve really beefed up our team and have added a number of key resources. We’ve created an in-house team for User Experience Design and have encouraged a number of our developers to pursue industry certifications. We’ve gained significant experience in working on ground-breaking RIAs, and have brought in a number of really exciting new clients.

Stay tuned tomorrow for my predictions on the year to come.

Tags: Adobe AIR, Mobile, RIAs, Rich Internet applicaitons, SaaS, Silverlight
Posted in Rich Internet Applications, Trends and Technology | No Comments »

First SaaS, now PaaS

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

It was bound to happen. First we saw Software as a Service (SaaS), now we have Platforms as a Service (PaaS). SaaS’s refer to on-tap applications that are available on an as-needed basis. In the early days, many of these services were faceless and designed to be hidden behind other applications. These days, there is an increasing number of SaaS’s that have an embeddable user interface, with some even offering a configurability for users (through a preferences button, for example) or programmers (through parameters included in the initialization call, for example).

A PaaS is a programming or programmable environment presented as a rich Internet application (RIA). Bungee Connect is such an example. It looks like a MS Visual Studio reincarnated into an RIA and has a very strong leaning towards mashing up SaaS’s. On the lighter side, you get something like Blist , a database management system meant for business users, not programmers. It strangely looks like what Filemaker should have become had it jumped the RIA curve. In the lower-level “enabling software” category you find Elastra, a database design and management environment that lives in Amazon’s EC2/S3 environment. It directly competes against Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL type solutions, but with a different business model. It makes MySQL and Postgress available “on-tap” at a rate of 50 cents per server/hour under a hassle-free, no-install environment.

Other experimental projects include Yahoo! Pipes and Microsoft Popfly, but generally this trend means that, in hindsight, SaaS is not such a crazy idea after all. Compared to PaaS, SaaS suddenly sounds quite reasonable and conservative.