Thanks Silverlight, you just validated RIA (Wrong, here's why)

In 2002 one of the guys ( Jeremy Allaire) whom I owe my house & lifestyle to, came up with an idea that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) should exist in a certain way, with a certain direction going forward. I trusted his idea, as the last one was Coldfusion and it paid off for me so I went with it (had been using Flash prior to this so figured it wouldn't hurt).

Redsquares were evil.
I spent enormous amounts of time trying to either extend Flash's V1 Framework to suite my own needs or beat it with a version of my own framework. I was vocal about it, saying how hard and annoying it was and had zero love for "mix-in" approach (Decorator pattern to all you design pattern folks). I ended up supporting ghostwire.com's components as they were more mature and decided to build on from them.

The running joke in my cubicle in these days was "Barnesy, you going to upgrade to a blue circle" as for weeks on end, I'd have a Redsquares on my screen which represented a placeholder for code.

Point, I wanted RIA to succeed like the next guy, but it meant time and energy to build it.

Royale with Cheese please.
Around 2003. I remember reading up on DENG, this idea that Claus had where you could use Flash to read XHTML pages and it would render accordingly (as Flash had most of the primitives in place). I thought this was awesome as from there you could extend upwards and take a normal web page to the next level, so it was kind of like having a runtime within a runtime.

I decided to have a go at using this concept by reading in XML that would produce runtime applications that talked to Coldfusion. I posted about it on Macrofun.pvpers.com a blog I ran at the time. Libby Freligh (Former Product Manager for Flex) contacted me offline and asked if I would be interested in seeing this project Macromedia was working on, called Royale.

They showed me FLEX and I was hooked. I loved it's concept and it was 10 times more mature then anything I could ever come up with and so I built a career from there on out around it. I wanted RIA as badly as Jeremy had painted it.

Price is what killed RIA.
I got a call one day, it was missed one at that. I remember hearing the message "Scott, we are about to release the price tag and I know you don't like it, but could you not blog about it for a while" (as inside the GMC List for FLEX, we were told ahead of time and I was vocal about it). My blog at this time, Mossyblog.com was one of the first generation of Flex related blogs outside Macromedia and so I guess they thought folks would read and get spooked.

I hated the price tag, but I felt I owed Macromedia for letting me in on the Alpha, Beta and RC stages, so I complied. I also thought if more people use it, then it has to be a good thing for me right?

Wrong, the uptake was painfully slow, for weeks on end I'd get no love in the FLEX space and went back to coding Coldfusion 80% of the time.

People wanted FLEX SWF's outside the server but were told in order to use FLEX you must house the product on the server itself. Yet everyone whom knew FLEX agreed that the server was taking up valuable CPU and caught on that it was due to price tag that kept the reason for it's existence in place.

They got greedy.

Flex 2.0 came out and it was free.
Finally FLEX was given back to the people, the RIA movement in 2002 would move on and I even wrote an article for MX Developers Journal celebrating this. I thought, this is what we need, the RIA concept will take the world by storm and life would be good.

Adobe acquires Macromedia was the headline in blogs and I got nervous about all of this at the same time. I didn't know what was going on with Flash anymore and so I waited patiently. In doing this, A friend told me about Microsoft's movements have gotten mature, I had already known about XAML but didn't realize how mature it had become until around this time.

I was thinking "why would they want to enter the RIA space" as these guys aren't built for this kind of thing, design is foreign to them.

Can't beat them, join them.
I began to learn more about Microsoft, how Windows Form Development was easy to use and so on. These guys had their act together and once you got past the whole "Microsoft is evil" campaigns, you start to uncover that Microsoft has a valid offering here. If only they would use the technology in smarter ways. I caught onto WPF in its early form, and later WPF/e (Silverlight) and I started to see a picture immerge.

Late last year, I saw a job advert ("Developer Evangelist") and I actually thought it was Adobe, so I figured hell yeah, why not.  I got a phone call it was Microsoft, and I was shocked. I made the interviews and got the job and was sent to Seattle for chip implants.

I arrived and was shown around the product stacks, meet some of the brainstrust behind WPF and Silverlight, and was amazed at the level of thinking they have around the products. They got it, it's not about runtime it's about experience, going beyond the browser and doing so in as many ways as possible that reflect the developers themselves.

Good Experience (HTML/CSS/AJAX), Great Experience(Silverlight), Ultimate Experiences(WPF).
These are the three tiers of emerging technology coming out of Microsoft and they are going to offer developers three channels of distribution. It's not about Flash being a killed, it's about offerings.

Did Microsoft come to the table late? or is Adobe just not equipped to handle Jeremy's theory? Are we competing? or did Microsoft just grow impatient with all this RIA development happening at snails pace? I don't think it's an evil plot, I just think it's Microsoft catching onto the simple fact that DHTML (AJAX) development still to this day happens in a wide variety of solutions. In order to help these web applications go beyond the browser were possible, they came up with the above three tiers of execution.

Adobe will do their thing and they will eventually do it well, much better than what they are doing today. I hope LiveCycle doesn't end up being the new price tag killer for the FLEX 3.0 equation and I'm seeing signs of this in Apollo (hence why I'm so vocal about it). I look back on the first days of RIA, FLEX & so on and ponder as to where we would all be if Flex 1.0 was given away and was integrated with Flash Professional instead of going after Enterprise aggressively as they did.

Microsoft are getting back to basics, empowering developers & designers to talk with one another through languages like XAML. Make no mistake, this isn't about validating Adobe, it's about focusing on the user experience.

I've been doing RIA both pre-2002 and post-2002, Jeremy put the ideas to words but i'd love an update to this RIA paper though.

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 21, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
  fwiw, I also originally attributed the acronym to a single author, but learned later "RIA" principles came about through a larger group effort within Macromedia. "Rich Internet Applications" preceded Flex by quite a bit... "RIA" introduced in March 2002; first word of Macromedia Royale in June 2003; Flex 1.0 ship in January 2004. That "good/better/best experience" metric misses the tradeoffs of potential audience (OS choice), plausible audience (browser installation), development costs (multi-target HTML). jd/adobe

• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
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• Anonymous
  April 22, 2007
  Burak, Fair call. Maybe I've overstepped the bounds a little so I'll take your crit as being constructive and try a different approach. RIA i take your point, I wouldn't also buy to much stock into a plot by Microsoft to own RIA, it's merly a play on words to get people thinking I guess about being interactive, focus on the user experience - experience matters that sort of thing. Internet i dunno, i think it's the wrong word but i must confess, I'm not entirely sure what the perfect word is, internet isn't it (to limiting). Chips are good, except when they run out of batteries in which case I'm ranting on my blog ;) hehe. Thanks for your feedback though Burak, I respect you enough to take it as being accurate. Scott.

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2007
  <em>"Internet was used when the playing field was -a- runtime within a browser."</em> The Internet is the "network of networks", through which information can be transferred by various protocols. Browsers are for navigating the World Wide Web of hyperlinked documents, using the HTTP protocol upon the net. The Web is one part of the Net. Network activity may be asynchronous, as noted in the March 2002 Macromedia whitepaper introducing the term Rich Internet Application. jd/adobe

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2007
  So you're saying "Intra-net" and "Inter-net" are one in the same by your definition? define: intranet computer network within organization: a network of computers, especially one using World Wide Web conventions, accessible only to authorized users such as those within a company define: internet global computer network: a network that links computer networks all over the world by satellite and telephone, connecting users with service networks such as e-mail and the World Wide Web I think there's a difference and given that most LOB FLEX applicatons are housed inside a firewall? shrug RIA starts to have fluid "I" based words. I think the real issue here is we all just "accepted" internet as being an ok word and never gave it much though. Yet, the moment someone changes it (being Microsoft also added more fuel to that fire) it began to make people more aware and sensitive to the issue at hand. I wonder if the same fallout would of ocurred had Jeremy came forward and said "Ya know, actually Interactive is much easier to live with"... Yet, because Microsoft did it, well it must be bad by default right? I'd love Jeremy's take on this as it would settle this debate once and for all.

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2007
  fwiw, I also originally attributed the acronym to a single author, but learned later "RIA" principles came about through a larger group effort within Macromedia. <em>"So you're saying "Intra-net" and "Inter-net" are one in the same by your definition?"</em> No. Ravens and writing-desks, perhaps...? jd/adobe

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2007
  Yesterday's comment here never made it out of the moderation queue... "intranet" and "internet" remain discrete terms, of course. There was also a reprint of the first paragraph of my first comment here, because it appears it had not been read. jd/adobe

• Anonymous
  April 24, 2007
  heh, no idea what you are talking about :) heh (sorry was confused). p.s sorry for the comments, was on plane from Australia to Seattle so there goes a bulk of my online time ;)