Yesterday we sent out the latest issue of the RIA Buzz Newsletter from Adobe, and received an email from one of the subscribers asking us to mention his RIA Cruise in the next issue of the newsletter. Of course we will, but I couldn't wait that long to blog about it. This is the first RIA cruise that I've heard about, but hopefully not the last.

The cruise leaves Miami on Monday, February 9th and returns on Friday, February 13th. You'll visit 3 cities (on 3 different islands) while on the cruise: Grand Bahama Island, Nassau and Great Stirrup Cay.

Inside rooms start at $345 per person (dbl occupancy) for the 5 day cruise. Balcony rooms are $595.

RIA Adventure.com has all the details, including how to sign up the cruise.

O'Reilly has launched a new RIA focused site - Inside RIA. The site currently features blog posts from leading RIA developers, including Andre Charland from Nitobi (a recent star on TV with Leo Laporte), Rich Tretola who blogs at EverythingFlex.com, Tony MacDonell from Teknision, Andrew Trice from Cynergy Systems, and more. They'll be blogging and talking about Designing rich Internet applications, Developing rich Internet applications and the Standards that exist for RIA development.

Alan Greendyk, a very talented developer from a large financial services firm, took third place and $10 K in the Documentum 6 Web Services Developer Challenge contest with a Flex and LiveCycle application. The app that Alan built was a Flex application that interacted with LiveCycle and allowed people to easily publish documents into Documentum, and also easily search that same Documentum repository. I was shown the application last week, and was impressed at how easy it was to use (having used Documentum in the past) and the fact that the app was built by one single person.

EMC released a press release of the contest today, and I noticed that the second place finisher was also an RIA application. Five developers used the Google Web Toolkit to build an RIA UI to Documentum. Its great to see two Rich Internet Applications taking two of the top 3 spots in the contest. It does appear that RIAs are gaining attention with large enterprises - Flex had great success at the Salesforce.com event a while back as well.

Adobe will be hosting a live question and answer online chat today from 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM ET. If you've got questions about RIA technologies like Ajax, Flex and Adobe AIR, head over to the Flex developer center, click on the link to join the chat, and ask away. James Ward, Ryan Stewart, Matt Chotin, Dave McAllister and I will be on hand to answer any questions you have about rich Internet applications. The RIA live chat will also be featured on the front page of Sourceforge.net and Slashdot.org in a marketing campaign for Adobe RIA technologies.

(Via Flex Team Blog)

Matt Voerman has started a blog series on what motivates people and businesses to build rich Internet applications. The two initial articles, focusing on Web 2.0 and SOA, and user experiences, are great reads for anyone who is interested in building out an RIA.

One thing that Matt nails in his discussion on user experiences is the fact that UI and experience design are becoming much more critical to applications than ever before. However I think he fails to mention one of the primary reasons for this: more and more services are becoming commodities that anyone can use and build into their applications. Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and others have created a set of services that are freely available to anyone - just sign up and go. Their work, along with that of a number of open source projects (like Drupal for instance) means that the backend for an application can't be the differentiator - anyone can take the services that those applications offer and build out an application.

Combine that with the fact that competition online is incredibly intense. Small start up costs allow pretty much anyone to start a company that can build out an app using those services. What's the difference between the company that I start and the company that you start, if we're both hosted on Amazon EC 2 (for performance), storing our data on Amazon S3 (unlimited storage paid as we use it), and integrating with user information from Facebook (so users don't have to register for our site). Why will someone use my application and not yours? The main difference, as those services become available to everyone, is the user experience. Which application do I prefer using? Which application allows users to get the job done faster?

Don't get me wrong, a great user experience won't solve all your problems. Network effects are also important - being first to market can provide a company with more users than another, and the network effects from these users can make a company difficult to overtake. (Its not impossible however - look at how Facebook is taking over MySpace and LinkedIn as the primary social networking tool though one could argue that Facebook also provides a better user experience than MySpace as well.) However, as more services come online that allow anyone to create high performing, scalable applications, its becoming increasingly clear that the user experience will be the primary differentiator.

This article on TechCrunch really caught my eye. Apparently, the team from Worth 1000 have a new project called Aviary.

Aviary will provide both a marketplace for creative professionals to showcase and sell their artwork as well as a set of 14 online tools to create and edit the artwork. The online tools (all named after birds) range from image editing, vector illustration, swatch generation and even audio & video editing. According to their website at creationonthefly.com, the tools will integrated with each other - allowing users to create an asset in one tool and bring it into another.

While there is no shortage of online image editors on the web today, this is certainly the first project (that I'm aware of) that will bring such a full suite of functionality to content creation. Indeed, it's hard not to compare the project to Adobe's Master Collection. Will creative professionals be inclined to switch from desktop tools to their online counterparts? Will they have to switch to take advantage of the marketplace? According to the TechCrunch article, the tools are all created using Flex - which means that there's also the potential that Aviary could create desktop versions of the tools using Adobe AIR. This is definitely a project I'll be following. Stay tuned!

There's a three very big announcements from Adobe today that have really moved the needle forward for RIA developers.

First, a new version of Flex has been released, Flex 3. You can find Flex Builder 3 and the Flex 3 SDK online for donwload. Remember that Flex 3 is open source, under the MPL license, and with that comes some new sites to help manage the open source project. There's a open bug database online, and a Wiki with project details.

Secondly, Adobe has renamed Apollo to Adobe Integrated Runtime (Adobe AIR). There's a new release for this as well that adds in HTML / Ajax support, along with PDF (using Adobe Reader 8.1), a native local database called SQLite, and many more improvements.

Finally, Adobe has released a preview version of the next version of Flash Player, which includes a number of improvements, most which I don't understand. Check out this labs page for details on them.

There's a ton of coverage in the blogosphere about these announcements, especially about the renaming of Adobe AIR. Jay Fortner covers it at ReadWriteWeb, Ryan Stewart has a lot of great information, and Ted Patrick has some great insight and a ton of posts on his blog.

TechCrunch had a story the other day about a new start up called CoRank that allows you to setup your own Digg like website for any specific topic. I have set one up for rich Internet applications, and its online at ria.corank.com. The site allows anyone to submit stories that are then voted on and promoted to the front page. There are bookmarklets available for every major browser that allow you to easily add a story to the site, as well as links for blogs and websites.

Check it out and participate if you'd like to help highlight the great stories and examples of rich Internet applications that are out there.

There's an interesting discussion this morning on a few tech focused blogs about whether or not rich Internet applications matter. Anne Zelenka posted her thoughts at Web Worker Daily to get the discussion going, and many people have chimed in, including Ryan Stewart.

I think part of the problem is defining what exactly qualifies as a rich Internet application. I don't think there's a consistent definition of what constitutes an RIA. Some of the comments to Anne's post focus on Ajax, and adding Ajax functionality to existing websites. To me, those aren't rich Internet applications: they're websites with useability improvements added through the use of technology (mostly Ajax). I wouldn't classify YouTube as a rich Internet application - its a website that uses Flash to display content, but its not an application. Gmail, on the other hand, is definitely an RIA - its an application that would have been delivered as a desktop app not too long ago.

Wikipedia defines RIAs as "Web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications. RIAs typically transfer the processing necessary for the user interface to the Web client but keep the bulk of the data (i.e., maintaining the state of the program, the data etc) back on the application server."

When thought of in that form, RIAs have a number of advantages over traditional desktop applications, and these reasons form the basis for why RIAs are important. From a business perspective, a better user experience has been shown to increase conversion rates, increase spending amount and provide a higher return on investment. Rich Internet applications accomplish this for web applications focused on e-commerce and monetary transactions. They're important from a business perspective.

From a developer perspective, RIA development can lead to lower costs and quicker time to development. Fewer calls back to the server results in less data going over the wire, reducing bandwidth costs, and (if done properly), simplifying development. I've given examples of developers doing this in my talk on rich Internet applications at previous PHP conferences. Note that these benefits can apply not only to rich Internet applications, but any website that uses Ajax or Flash to improve the user experience. Macrumors saved something like 160 GB of data by moving to an Ajax system to refresh comments during one of Steve Jobs' keynotes.

From an end user experience, RIAs are an improvement. People no longer need to worry about installing applications and keeping software up to date. This is a major problem for many people - take a look at my parents or grandparents to see how much trouble it is to install an application and keep it up to date. The advertising revenue model has also reduced costs considerably, allowing people access to high quality software that may have been out of reach a few years ago with the traditional shrinkwrap software model.

One area that concerns me these days with respect to RIAs is the lack of consistent design patterns. The benefits of desktop applications come from the guidelines that have been developed for the two most popular platforms (Windows, Mac OS). The applications that run on those platforms have consistent menu placements and consistent behaviour (not always, but they're pretty good). The free form nature of the web and the lack of design patterns for RIAs has given us applications that are completely different and hard for people to learn. That's one thing I think that Adobe could play more of a leading role in.

RIAs are still a new concept, and are maturing as any other technology. Ryan points this out by comparing RIAs now to Super Mario Bros. As they mature in technology, they'll enable new applications to be delivered as RIAs, even some applications that today we couldn't imagine in the browser. Anne uses Photoshop as an example in her post. How much longer before Fauxto reaches that level of functionality? If Super Mario is any indication, its not going to be too long.

Today Sun will announce a scripting language called JavaFX Script, that will allow developers to build rich Internet applications that will run in the Java runtime. Java FX Script will be part of the Java FX product line, that focuses on non enterprise applications. Java developers can use Java FX Script to create applications that are rendered with UI elements from Java Swing. The following video provides more information (via):

Click To Play

There's also more information in this CNET story, as well as Ryan Stewart's blog.

Obviously we'll be hearing a lot more information about this in the next few days. What's the impact on RIA Developers? Well, Java developers now have a native option for developing RIAs, although one that continues to have some of the same problems that Java's already have (namely that it doesn't look that great, that there aren't great tools that integrate with industry standard design tools). Great user experiences don't come from software developers alone, and creating a new scripting language that makes it easier for Java developers doesn't mean that they'll be creating great new Java applications immediately. One of the reasons that Flash based RIAs work so well is because entire teams with various skills can use similiar products to deveop them. Designers can work closely with developers and user experience experts to build out great applications, and they currently use Adobe tools to build these. Developers that I've worked with in the past didn't create great user experiences, regardless of the language that they were using. They put red and green buttons in the UI, waiting for the designers to finalize the look of the application.

Microsoft does seem to get it - they're creating a new set of tools (Expression) that appeal to designers in addition to their Silverlight offering. Sun seems to be missing that critical piece.