Comparing various RIA technologies

Just viewed this presentation from one of the guys from parleys.com about his comparison of various RIA technologies. Basically he talks about how they went about choosing Flex to create the parleys.com website and then demonstrates the same website done with GWT and JavaFX all the while pointing out the pros and cons of each technology. Very well done.

Users love to customize an application

Over the past several years I have found myself coding applications that are used by several departments. And when this is the case, you quickly realize that every department has its own needs. Thus I ended up creating these weird application roles to differentiate which department the user belong too and had the UI for the application adjust accordingly. Simple concept, but creating roles for every specific configurable UI option is not the way to go.

So with the latest version of one application, I did away with the roles concept and simply created a "Preferences" panel where users can configure how the UI works. These options are then saved in a Flash cookie (as known as a Local Shared Object) and retrieved the next time the user accesses the application. This way, every user can configure the application to operate based on his/her own needs. The best example of this is a DataGrid were the user that configure which columns to show or hide. Making such components configurable is not difficult using the Flex framework which is build with this purpose in mind.

I find that this sort of application level configuration is something that has been missing from web applications over the years and is something than can be re-introduced with RIAs. So far this practice has been a success and I will definitly put it into use in future applications as well.

One final note, I allowed users to configure the colors of certain portions of the UI. So it is fun to see as I visit users from time-to-time that each of them has selected different colors. Puts a smile on their faces and thats part of our job :)

Ease of deployment is the key

There are many reasons why Flex is growing into a popular platform for creating RIAs: familiarity, great framework, simple yet powerful, etc... But the most important one I believe is ease of deployment. Think about it, even without the server component (now even that is free, see BlazeDS), you can create something pretty compelling. Case in point, just this week one of my work colleagues decided to dive head first into Flex. He comes from a Java/Swing background and started building a small application to learn the ropes, an album manager/viewer for his family and friends. He is loving it, but the best part is that he is going to make it available to his family and friends by hosting it on a server he is already using for other things. Nothing special for him to do, just drop the SWF file on the server and everyone can access it, thats how easy it is and that is why Flex is so successful. Could he have done this so easily in Swing? Nope, the client install would have been tedious, not impossible, but still quite an effort. The small footprint of the Flash player and seemless install is what makes this all possible. Who would have thought 10 years ago the little Flash Player would have been this powerful... great things come in small packages.