“Enough with the new words already.” That was how Sean Voisen recently ended a discussion about the burgeoning technology lexicon, which he thinks can only be explained as “a ploy to keep Merriam-Webster in business.”
Voisen, who designs and builds Rich Internet Applications, web applications, data visualizations and what he calls “other fun pieces of Internet-enabled software” for a living, is not a fan of ‘RIA’ as a term.
“Marketing gurus create new terminology like ‘RIA’ and ‘Web 2.0’ in order to force people to engage in new conversations without them dragging along their baggage of ingrained prejudices about what something is or is not,” Voisen contends. “They also do it – I am convinced – to make themselves seem smart,” he adds. Voisen’s view is echoed by Ethan Eismann, the Senior Experience Design Lead of Adobe Thermo with Adobe’s XD team. He disagrees with ‘RIA’ as a term for two reasons: “First, because like all things techy, it’s already obsolete and second because it’s limiting.”
But Eismann admits that while he hates ‘RIA’ he also loves it:
“I love it because it’s now such a part of the common vernacular of web culture that when it’s used everyone immediately understands that you are talking about ‘something better than primitive HTML websites.’”
Its limiting factor as a term, according to Eismann, has to do with the two words “Internet” and “application.” Personally he prefers to use the acronym ‘RIE’ – for ‘Rich Interactive Experience.’
Front-end engineering experts like Voisen and Eismann remind us that the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the iPhone experience have shown that great user interface design makes a big difference, that the era of what Eismann calls primitive HTML websites is truly over, and that on the Web the new priority is innovation and optimizing the User eXperience (UX).
The tools and platforms that encourage and support superior UX are becoming the pre-eminent tools for business survival and success, and their numbers are growing all the time, as evidenced for example by the mushrooming success of the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo series, which in October takes place in San Jose, California. The 6th International AJAXWorld is attracting delegates from around the world, eager to benefit from 75+ technical sessions, demos, and discussion panels as well as keynote addresses by two major thought leaders of the New Web, the user-focused Web: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Microsoft's Silverlight boss, Corporate VP of the .NET Development Platform, Scott Guthrie.
AJAXWorld delegates once again will be attending from all over the world
User-centered design for the Web is just one of the countless topics explored at this particular AJAXWorld – which is now as much about Rich Internet Applications and Web Development Frameworks as about merely AJAX per se. No other RIA-focused conference slices and dices the Web development and application space as boldly or as comprehensively: for 3 action-packed days the focus at The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose will be on 16 core topics: AIR & Flex, AJAX, ASP.NET, Business Case for RIAs, Cloud Computing, Comet, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), iPhone Development, JavaScript, Mashups, Mobile RIAs, Open APIs & Toolkits, SaaS, Security, Silverlight, Social Software, and User Interface & User eXperience Issues
After the resounding success of the first-ever iPhone technical sessions at AJAXWorld on the West coast in September ’07, a dedicated 2-day iPhone Developer Summit is in fact being held simultaneously with the 6th AJAXWorld in San Jose, CA – chaired by the editor-in-chief of iPhone Developer's Journal, Kevin Hoffman. Another indicator of the business and market-share power of superior user experience.
In the end – quite aside from whether you call them RIAs or RIEs – what matters is not words or terminology but business and the realities of enterprise computing. “RIAs are impacting the way that companies like eBay, Ford, Random House, Viacom, GE, Dow Jones, and NBC think about the Internet and desktop software, and are demonstrating how innovative thinking can completely change the way they do business,” says Anthony Franco, who joined the AJAXWorld speaker faculty earlier this year for the first time. As president of EffectiveUI, he enjoys unique opportunities to see close-up how Fortune 500 companies are beginning to harness RIAs and leverage them to improve the user experience and boost the bottom line.
Franco is typical of the caliber of speakers AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo attracts. In October the lineup includes:
The CTO of Adobe - Kevin Lynch (keynote)
Microsoft's Silverlight boss - Scott Guthrie (keynote)
The discoverer of JSON - Douglas Crockford
The creator of jQuery - John Resig
Senior Evangelist, Amazon - Jeff Barr
Principal Information Architect at Travelocity - Adam Polansky
Developer Advocate, Google - Chris Schalk
CTO for Emerging Internet Technologies, IBM - David Boloker
Group PM for the UI Framework and Services, Microsoft - Brad Abrams
Architect at eBay - Michael Galpin
Director, User Interface Engineering at Netflix - Bill Scott
VP of Engineering at TripIt.com - Andy Denmark
Lead JBoss Portal UI Engineer at JBoss/Red Hat - Wesley Hales
Operations Manager of the OpenAjaxAlliance - John Ferraiolo
Chief dragon-wrangler for Komodo - Shane Caraveo
UI Engineer & Architect at Orbitz Worldwide - Mike Meeker
Chairman & CEO of WaveMaker - Chris Keene
Chief Strategy Officer of Curl - Jnan Dash
CTO of Pathfinder Development - Dietrich Kappe
Founder & Chairman of Nexaweb - Coach Wei
Aptana's AJAX Architect - Greg Murray
Co-founder and CEO of Kaazing - Jonas Jacobi
Evangelist for Web Services and Web 2.0 Apps at Sun - Arun Gupta
Senior Engineer and Designer, Yahoo! - Nate Koechley
President and senior trainer at Object Training Group - James Harmon
Lead Developer of the Qcodo Framework for PHP - Michael Ho
Lead Software Architect for ILOG - Christophe Jolif
Front-end architect at Nethouse AB - Peter Svensson
VP of Business Development at CommuniGate Systems - Jon Doyle
Sr. Developer at Magnani Caruso Dutton - Mike Girouard
UI Architect at Edream Solutions - Sue Googe
System Operations Manager at EngineYard - Yehuda Katz
Co-Founder & COO of Bizwhazee - John Krahulec
Principal Engineer, VeriSign - Karthik Shyamsunder
Co-Founder & COO of Finicity - Nicholas Thomas
Principal Consultant, Experience Design at Molecular - Evan Gerber
Web Theorist, IBM - Andrew Donoho
President of IDC Consulting - John Fronckowiak
Tech Lead of the Spring Faces project - Jeremy Grelle
Senior Consultant at SpringSource - Rossen Stoyanchev
Editor-in-chief of iPhone Developer's Journal - Kevin Hoffman
Development Team Lead for the EGL Rich UI - Chris Laffra
Development Manager, UI Framework and Services, Microsoft - Matt Gibbs
Managing Partner of Catalyst Resources - Paul Giurata
Host of iPhoneWebDev.com - Christopher Allen
Co-founder of M/Gateway - Rob Tweed
Consultant, OneStopAppSecurity.com - Neil Smithline
Senior Research Analyst at Info-Tech - Howard Kiewe
Founder & CEO of OpenLink Software - Kingsley Idehen
Senior User Experience Designer at OneSpring - Laurie Gray
Bruce Arnold wrote: Kudos to the Cloud Crowd for Re-Inventing the Wheel!
One thing 30 years in the IT industry has taught me is that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Another is that the only memory we seem to access is short-term. A third is that techno-marketeers rely on that, so they can put labels like "revolutionary" and "innovative" on platforms, products and services that are mere re-inventions of the wheel ... and often poor copies at that.
A good example is all the latest buzz about "Cloud Computing" in general and "SaaS" (software as a service) in particular:
http://tinyurl.com/6let8x
Both terms are bogus. The only true cloud computing takes place in aircraft. What they're actually referring to by "the cloud" is a large-scale and often remotely and/or centrally managed hardware platform. We have had those since the dawn of automated IT. IBM calls them "mainfram...
Micro Focus has announced the availability of Micro Focus COBOL for Eclipse, encompassing versions of Micro Focus' Net Express and Server Express solutions designed specifically for the Eclipse open source ecosystem.
Micro Focus COBOL for Eclipse provides an integrated development en...
Only if you were on the dark side of the moon could you have missed the impact of the iPhone. Its sweeping success has brought mobile services into the mainstream. As the first device to convincingly integrate traditional phone capabilities with Web access, it highlights the multi-chan...
Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amaz...
It’s time to wrap up the year 2008 - a year of change with Obama, the Olympic Games and the financial crisis. It was also the year when Yahoo said no to Microsoft. 2009 will be all about Cloud Computing: the technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will ...
Genuitec has announced the production release of MyEclipse Enterprise Workbench 7.0. The new release, built upon Eclipse 3.4.1/Ganymede, delivers a comprehensive environment for AJAX and Web Services in the Eclipse space. In addition, MyEclipse 7.0 is delivered on top of the Pulse Ecli...
There's a new release of OpenSolaris out – OpenSolaris 2008.11 – out a whole three weeks before the end of 2008. There was a 2008.05 release, aka Project Indiana, in May but that wasn’t as commercial or production-oriented as this one. Both run only on x86 machines, not Sun's own...
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Only if you were on the dark side of the moon could you have missed the impact of the iPhone. Its sweeping success has brought mobile services into the mainstream. As the first device to convincingly integrate traditional phone capabilities with Web access, it highlights the multi-chan...
Much like “Web 2.0″, cloud computing was a collection of related concepts that people recognized, but didn’t really have a good descriptor for, a definition in search of a term, you could say. When Google CEO Eric Schmidt used it in 2006 to describe their own stuff and then Amaz...
It’s time to wrap up the year 2008 - a year of change with Obama, the Olympic Games and the financial crisis. It was also the year when Yahoo said no to Microsoft. 2009 will be all about Cloud Computing: the technological hype has started already but the commercial breakthrough will ...
There's a new release of OpenSolaris out – OpenSolaris 2008.11 – out a whole three weeks before the end of 2008. There was a 2008.05 release, aka Project Indiana, in May but that wasn’t as commercial or production-oriented as this one. Both run only on x86 machines, not Sun's own...
