Digital Thoughts @ Wesstyware

Let me start with a quick introduction to this blog post/question. When I was interviewed by ANVIL for my current position, I didn’t know what an RIA was. Obviously things turned out well as I am still working here, but for all you people applying for jobs out there, make sure you know and understand all the works/acronyms that make up your potentially future job title.

This question isn’t as simple as it seems. When I started my journey as an RIA Developer here at ANVIL Digital, I pretty much considered any web-based application or web site with an exceptionally rich UI and/or UX to be an RIA. Using the magical power of Google to try and answer this question and the most relevant link that I have found is this one. The criteria that helps Mrinal decide what kind of applications can be considered Rich Internet Applications makes a lot of sense. In case you didn’t click the link above, they are as follows:

1. It has to be an Application … something that deals with dynamic data, takes an input and processes it to produce valuable output.
2. Its primary function should be to deal with data that lives on the Internet (or intranets).
3. It should offer a user experience that is Richer than what we’ve been used to in the past in a particular environment.

Taking these criteria into consideration when looking at different web applications that are out there, really got me thinking outside of my regular UI point of view.

Going back to what I had originally believed to be an RIA, the key element that I was not considering was Mrinal’s first point: It has to be an Application. I suppose a flash site or any regular web site could be considered an application to a certain degree, but in reality is it just a really fancy document. The sites present static data and the users read it. They don’t manipulate it, they don’t work with it, they just read it. If we had a desktop application that did the same thing as a website, would we consider that an application? I certainly would not.

I suppose what I am trying to say is that a web site that looks really pretty, and has an exceptionally rich UI does not necessarily make it an RIA. This is something that everyone should consider when they are throwing around the term “RIA”, as if you put that in your product definition, you might be biting off more than you can chew. The way I see it, web designers nor web developers should really be able to build an RIA on their own. You really need both to your application a full-fledged RIA.

What are your thoughts on the matter? Do you think the criteria make sense, or am I way off base. Leave comments and let us discuss.

Catch you on the flip side.

Side Note: I will be away from my blog for the next two weeks as I’m on vacation overseas. Hopefully your hearts can handle it, but I assure you that I will return. Take it easy friends.

If you haven’t been following Mix 2009 that went down in Las Vegas last week, then you haven’t heard that the Silverlight 3 beta has been officially released to the public. Although your "standard" Internet user may not have a serious interest in the new version of Silverlight, as an RIA developer I am exceptionally excited. The features that are to be included in this release finally give Silverlight the power it needs to take on the powerhouse of Flash/Flex. I have missed working in Silverlight 2 for the past many months at work, but with Silverlight 3 finally being available for me to play with, it has awoken Silverlight beast that rested dormant inside of my digital soul.

If you are interested in getting started on learning about this technology, or even better, start a little software development you should start at the source which is the Microsoft community site, Silverlight.NET. I haven’t been visiting as much as I once did, but be sure that you will probably see me wondering the forums a little more often in the upcoming weeks.

With the Silverlight coming alive inside of me and spring creeping up, I have decided to update my personal development environment on my laptop where I author the amazing content you find in my blog. I figure as I will be talking about software development some of the time, it makes sense to share my development environment with the all of you. This list covers all the development software and tools that I will have installed by tomorrow morning.

• Windows 7 Ultimate (Beta)
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP1
• Expression
  • Blend 2 SP1
  • Web 2
• Silverlight 3 Beta
  • Silverlight 3 Beta Tools for Visual Studio
  • Silverlight Toolkit March 2009
  • Blend 3 Preview
  • .NET RIA Services (very cool RIA development component)
• Gimp 2.6

I realize that using Windows 7 might be a bit of a risk in terms of development as it is only in beta. I have heard good things about the stability of the Windows 7 beta, so I figure why not. The plan is to clean off the laptop and see if I can get all my hardware drivers working properly before I start installing the rest of the software. If this fails then I will just return to using my good old Vista Business with SP1.

With Silverlight 3 being released, Microsoft has also released a preview of .NET RIA Services which, I admit, had a very interesting sounding name but as I hadn’t heard anything of the sort prior to Mix, I wasn’t overly excited. After reading a bit of the lab posted at Silverlight.NET, my feelings changed drastically. From what I can gather, all the difficulties our team needed to overcome in Silverlight 2 seem to be resolved thanks to .NET RIA Services. I think this can really round out Silverlight as a solid development platform, and would suggest that any and all Silverlight developers utilize it ASAP.

The last tool you might be wondering about is the Gimp 2.6. For anyone that has worked with UI development, or with a design team, you should know that you will need to play around with graphics at some point when you are building that UI. As I do not require all the features that comes with Adobe CS4, or Microsoft Design, I use the Gimp because it is free and it has all the tools I need for the image manipulation that I do in my projects. For anyone who likes to play around with images, whether it be for UI development or just playing around with digital photos, I would recommend giving it a try.

I am exceptionally excited to get everything working and to get myself back into the Silverlight stream of things. There is more work to be done before I can start creating partitions, which is what I am going to do right now.

Catch you on the flip side.