Pinderkent

The Where are the RIA "killer apps"? article that Kas Thomas recently wrote is both insightful and absolutely correct. Despite all the hype around them, he correctly points out that RIAs, short for Rich Internet applications, have been an utter failure. And it's not just one vendor's implementation that has failed, either. We just haven't seen anything truly useful produced using Microsoft's Silverlight, Adobe's Flex and Sun's JavaFX.

In the past, I have written about the lack of technical merit of these RIA platforms. I think this contributes to why we really haven't seen anything truly innovative and useful built upon them. They're such a feeble foundation to begin with that perhaps they can't allow for anything truly useful to be done with them.

One thing we can consider is why some people think we even have a need for RIAs in the first place. The typical argument is that the Web browser just isn't a suitable platform for building more complex applications. This is obviously quite true. The browser and the Web were originally intended for displaying documents and allowing for navigation between them. Over time, hacks like JavaScript were integrated into the more popular browsers, allowing for some degree of programmability. Some developers soon mistook the browser as an application development platform. So here we are today, with many believing that the Web and Web browsers are somehow replacements for our existing desktop environments.

Of course, the Web browser is quite a crippled software development environment. You're limited to essentially one language, JavaScript. Pixel-perfect layout is a huge hassle. When you add in the numerous bugs, incompatibilities and inconsistencies between browsers, life becomes even more difficult. In short, what we could do relatively easily with more traditional application development platforms quickly becomes much more awkward in the Web browser, leading to poor-quality applications that take longer to develop.

RIAs have arisen as a bandage to try and make application development within the Web browser more friendly. Java applets and Silverlight are good examples of vendors trying to essentially push their desktop-oriented platforms into the browser. Of course, anyone who has developed software using the non-embedded versions of those platforms know how much nicer they are to work with than the browser-based variants, and more importantly, how much more productive.

I don't think that RIAs and their platforms can be salvaged. They're a failed technology, built specifically to exist within a feeble technology. If we want our applications to be network-aware and network-accessible, there are much better approaches. And nothing is stopping is from using HTTP; we can use it more effectively if it's not returning HTML, JavaScript, or CSS. So perhaps we should just let these RIA platforms die off, so we can get back to writing innovative software using real application platforms that promote developer productivity.