Look How Rich and Thin We Are - The State of the RIA Market

I spoke yesterday with Michael Cote of Redmonk and Ryan Stewart of Adobe (the RIA blog is here, on ZDNet here podcast is here). What follows are some of the highlights of our discussion on the state of the RIA market.

Today, there are two ways to build your first Web 2.0 application:

1. Buy $300 worth of O'Reilly books and kiss the next few weekends goodbye


2. Download WaveMaker and follow the 15 minute tutorial

For anybody but the most hardcore or masochistic tech-heads, this seems like a no-brainer decision.

If Web 2.0 is about putting more power into the hands of end users, that message hasn't hit the Ajax world yet. In general, Rich Internet Applications toolkits from Dojo to Flex are well beyond the reach of anything but the most sophisticated developers (not that I am a particular fan of Flex).

WaveMaker is focused on lowering the price of admission for Web 2.0 application development. WaveMaker provides an easy on ramp to building web applications, allowing non-expert developers to build rich internet AJAX applications

How complicated an application can you build with a visual Ajax tool? Well, we built the WaveMaker studio using WaveMaker, so you can build a very complex application indeed using visual Ajax tools!

What kinds of applications are best for a visual Ajax tool like WaveMaker? We see our community building three kinds of applications:

1. Rich Internet Application prototyping. Business analysts


2. Rapid Application Development using database driven forms generation


3. Face of SOA applications. Assemble rich internet applications by combining web services and data services.

WaveMaker is the PowerBuilder for Web 2.0 - we make it easy for large community of people to get benefits of rich internet applications.

As usual, the bogeyman for all this Rich Internet goodness is Microsoft. The current fragmentation of the Ajax market and related squabbling between toolkits fanboys makes Microsoft's Silverlight solution a much simpler choice for developers.

More importantly, before the introduction of WaveMaker's visual Ajax studio, Microsoft's visual studio was winning over the novice developers by default. It's time for the open source world to provide a compelling and CIO-safe alternative to Silverlight and WaveMaker is just the company to do it!

Another Ignoramus For Ajax

I recently posted an article entitled, Really Idiotic Approaches to RIA to point out how 1980s the proprietary Rich Internet Application solutions from Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flex) are.

Not surprisingly, this elicited predictably troll-ish "contributions" in my comment section, including one which opened with "you are an ignoramus." After I had looked up ignoramus in the dictionary (no, it is not an absent-minded dinosaur), I thought a bit about how Ajax looks from troll-land.

The argument for Silverlight and Flex is that Ajax is bad because it is not cross browser. Let’s examine that for a second. Cross browser at this point is really shorthand for “runs the same on Firefox and Explorer.”

When we parse that a bit more, we find that many of the cross-browser problems come from Microsoft’s poor implementation of the standards. And hey, whadda you know, Microsoft benefits from its poor implementation by getting witless developers to adopt their proprietary, Microsoft-only solution as a reward for Microsoft’s poor implementation.

And if you feel that Microsoft should not be rewarded for this kind of behavior, but do not have the weight of the EU behind you to slap a $600M fine on them, you can always choose a different proprietary solution and get locked into Adobe forever.

So the argument against Ajax, if I understand it, is that this open-source thing is just a crock, that nobody will ever get the cross-platform right, and the sooner we all just capitulate and fold up our tents, the sooner the caps-lock trolls will leave us alone? I think I'd rather stay an ignoramus.