Last night I attended a monthly Chicago IxDA Rich Internet Applications meeting. The IxDA website is http://gamma.ixda.org/local.php. This event was hosted by ARC Worldwide, a marketing services agency. You can visit their website at http://www.arcww.com. As a beginner in Rich Internet Application development, my intent was to see how this technology can be utilized in the real world, what are its advantages and disadvantages, and where do people who use this technology every day feel it is headed in the future.
Demonstrations
In general, I find that when a presenter is demoing their projects it is nice at times to be ‘wowed’, but also nice to feel this was definitely a task I could accomplish. I had both these feelings while watching these demonstrations. The first demo, Wilson Sporting Goods website, I was mildly impressed with. It was pretty, user friendly, and had some interesting animations. However, I thought the lag time on certain items of the application hindered the overall experience. This application was built with a mixture of Flash, AJAX, and HTML.
The next few demos really didn’t catch my attention as they seemed like simple applications. There was a Facebook application which the developers played around with our Facebook Developer Toolkit, I talked to them a little bit about that afterwards.
The real ‘wow’ came from the Microsoft rep and his demos of Silverlight, WPF, and an application called Seadragon. You can check this out at http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx. I was amazed in every aspect at this application. Basically, it displays large amounts of data, such as books and magazines, in a readable and viewable format. The zooming capabilities are simple and cool to use. Also the amount of data it displays, whether its text or pictures, is very impressive. Are we seeing the future of literature? Are books and magazines a thing of the past?
Discussions
There was an interesting debate on the usage of a Rich Application and when the amazement just surpasses the need. An example that was brought up often was the comparison of Google Earth to Google Maps. Google Earth is really cool and everyone has at least used it once, but for practical purposes, most people still use Google Maps to look up directions.
Another topic was what is the driving force behind Rich Applications? Web 2.0 was pushed by the developers and designers as they found this easier for wide distribution of an application. Now that Rich application development is more easily made, with tools like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight and WPF, how can this impact industry standards to where it’s a viable solution? What kind of applications do our users want? Would users still what something that is easy as opposed to something that is visually stimulating yet harder to work with on an everyday basis? There wasn’t a clear answer to this, but one route discussed was marketing research. Marketing research for application development is more important now than ever.
Conclusion
As someone who is really trying to jump on the design bandwagon from a developer background, this meeting really helped me relate this architecture I still deem ‘fun programming’ with core client application development philosophies that I deal with on a regular basis. I believe the future will consist of a mixture of application design philosophies. I think the conventional client who wants something simple and stupid but does the job will always be there. I do also believe more clients will go the route of a rich application as they’d feel this would better their business scenario. However, that being said with the advancement of technology the way it is, something simple and stupid of the future may be something that’s hard and complex now.
I am looking forward in having fun with these tools, developing games, websites, etc. I am also looking forward to writing my first client-based application with them. The future looks bright for rich application development.