Today’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Adobe MAX 2009 conference taking place at the Los Angeles Convention Center downtown Los Angeles, CA. Today’s topic is Rich Internet Application, (RIA) Service Oriented Architecture, (SOA) and the Enterprise.
To assist me in the process of better understanding the topic from a Web designer, Web developer and from the business value proposition perspective, I sat down with Duane Nickull, Senior Evangelist at Adobe.
Duane’s an accomplished Web professional and a main focus of his professional career has been working for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems. Since 1996, Duane also has been working on multiple enterprise architectures including many service oriented architectures (SOA) within various standards bodies including W3C, UN/CEFACT, OASIS and others. Duane has also contributed to many SOA papers and articles on service oriented architecture.
Check out the full three minute podcast on today’s Web Professional Minute.
Check out Duanes blog for additional information abut Duane and his rants, rave and event coverage.
A full transcript will follow in twenty for hours.
Today’s Web Professional Minute is sponsored by the Nokia Corporation and their Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) Extension for Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 software making the creation of mobile WRT widgets for supporting Nokia devices easier then ever. Through the Nokia Ovi Store and Adobe AIR Marketplace, developers and designers have an easy way to engage, build and publish their content to Nokia mobile device customers. For additional information check out the Nokia Forum.
About Rich Internet applications (RIAs)
According to Wikipedia, Rich Internet applications (RIAs) are web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines.[1] Examples of RIA frameworks include Curl, GWT, Adobe Flash/Adobe Flex/AIR, Java/JavaFX, uniPaaS, Mozilla’s XUL and Microsoft Silverlight.
The term was introduced in March 2002 by vendors like Macromedia who were addressing limitations at the time in the “richness of the application interfaces, media and content, and the overall sophistication of the solutions” by introducing proprietary extensions.[5][dubious – discuss] As web standards (such as HTML 5) have developed and web browsers’ compliance has improved there is still need for such extensions, when companies want to bring a truly high-end, seamless experience to their users. Javascript compilers with their associated desktop-like widget sets reduce the need for browser extensions even further. HTML 5 delivers a pseudo-application platform. It is still not possible to build RIA-like Web applications that run in all modern browsers without the need of special run-times or plug-ins. This means that if one could run a modern Ajax-based Web application outside of a web browser (e.g. using Mozilla Prism or Fluid) it would essentially be an RIA, though there is some contention as to whether this is actually the case.
About Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
In computing, service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a set of principles of governing concepts used during phases of systems development and integration. Such an architecture will package functionality as interoperable services: software modules provided as a service can be integrated or used by several organizations, even if their respective client systems are substantially different. It is an attempt to develop yet another means for software module integration. Rather than defining an API, SOA defines the interface in terms of protocols and functionality. An endpoint is the entry point to such an SOA implementation. Service-orientation requires loose coupling of services with operating systems, and other technologies that underlie applications. SOA separates functions into distinct units, or services[1], which developers make accessible over a network in order to allow users to combine and reuse them in the production of applications. These services communicate with each other by passing data from one service to another, or by coordinating an activity between two or more services. SOA can be seen as a sort of continuum, as opposed to distributed computing or modular programming.