With all the excitement and innovations of Web 2.0 technologies (Ajax, RSS/Atom, Mashups, Social Networking, Wikis, Blogs, etc.) happening in the consumer sector, it feels like the enterprises have been laggards, using the old client-server desktop GUI's or at best Web 1.0 rendering of static pages. Hence a common question in the industry has been this - when would enterprises deploy Web 2.0 technologies? Of course, unlike the consumer sector, enterprises operate on stricter rules of "business value" and ROI. Deploying technology for the sake of technology is never acceptable and there is lots of debate on the business value of technologies such as blogging, or wikis. But we see some industry activities here during last 12 months, mostly in the Rich Internet Applications (RIA) arena.

Martin Heller of InfoWorld gave a great definition to RIA as follows:

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically executes on the remote server.

RIAs try to allocate resources to the most appropriate place. If the gating issue is the overall scalability of the application, then the designer of the RIA will run most of the CPU-intensive computations on the client. On the other hand, if the application uses a database intensively, then many actions will run on the server.

Many RIAs are written to accommodate intermittent connectivity. If such an app needs a database resource, a local database kicks in when the local computer disconnects from the Internet. When an Internet connection is reestablished, the application synchronizes the local database with the central database.

Current RIA technologies can be divided into three categories: browser-based, browser extensions via plug-in, and outside-the-browser. Browser-based solutions are grouped into "Ajax" and they have serious scalability, security, and performance issues for enterprise-class applications. They dominate in the consumer space, which abhors any plug-ins. Adobe's Flex and Microsoft's Silverlight both belong to the second category of browser plug-in, which renders the application in the browser but have extended functions. Adobe's AIR (Adobe Integration Runtime) can run outside the browser in its own process in the client and behaves as a desk-top application. However both these solutions are unproven for large scale enterprise applications with requirements for speed and scale.

Curl's RIA Platform, had its origin at MIT research and was designed from day one for enterprise-class applications on the web. There are over 300 customers, primarily in Japan, using the Curl platform for mission-critical applications (many of which were client-server implementations before). They have realized significant ROI.

Curl does use a plug-in and shifts many complex processing to the client machine (code gets compiled via a JIT compiler for high speed), thus reducing roundtrips to the server. Applications can run offline and get synced up when connected to the server, a great feature for traveling sales people.

Gartner group categorizes RIA Platform as an emerging one with rapid adoption over next 2-5 years. Customers of SAP and Oracle applications must start demanding RIA on the web-platform for reduced TCO and richer UI.

We will explore customer examples of RIA in a future article.

Jnan Dash is Chief Strategy Officer of Curl Inc.