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Well the future is here and it is RIA. There is really no reason for a development team not to use RIA because the User Interface is so much better than the HTML based alternatives. Even for a data entry style web based application it makes sense to make the user interface good looking, especially if it is an otherwise drab application: sort of like applying lipstick onto a pig.
It is no secret that Java has not really done a stellar job on the Client side. Swing doesnt, and Applets were forgotten in the great migration to the server side. And rightly so: they really couldnt create a compelling user experience. Java rules on the Server side and it appears to me that it is with great reluctance that Presentation tier technologies come to the party. I mean look at JSP or JSF, they dont quite make the cut when it comes to an immersive user experience. Well we are engineers first and creative artists next (read that as never :-)) and hence we focus on solving exciting problems on the server side: users should drool at our cleverness in solving distributed computing problems, right? We actually took the concept of the swine makeup example above and turned it inside out: we make an outstanding application quite drab because of its staid user interface.
It is ironic that while Java was first in getting mobile code to ship to the browser and then execute in a VM, it somehow didnt go further in converting that execution environment into a full fledged media processing environment. If that had happened then Java would be King both on the Server side and on the Client side. Today the Flash Player or the Real Player or a SilverLight plug-in are all an execution layer similar to a VM which processes proprietary formats.
So why not build a universal media processor (much like the Universal remote) which can be a cross browser plug-in and which can process swf from a flex environment, XAML and ECMAScript from a Silverlight environment, swf and allied formats from OpenLaszlo, and even XML and tags from a JSP/JSF environment? Then we would have a unified client side technology even though there might be different Presentation tier technologies and hopefully finally the different Presentation tier technologies themselves will give way to a unified format.
Then the designers lives will be greatly simplified: if you think about it, it is really not that difficult to come to a consensus because all the different environments that were referred to above are all similar in the sense that there is a markup language (XAML, XML, MXML) combined with a Scripting environment (Javascript, ECMAScript, ActionScript). So at the risk of a slightly larger run time environment we can explore the possibility of creating this universal processor which can then convert any combination of the above into a format that can be processes on the browser. Now a user surfing from a Flex powered site to a Silverlight site can seamlessly access content without having to have two different environments.
By focusing on the XAML/Javascript and Actionscript/MXML environment we could bypass the need to process proprietary swf and silverlight formats.
One thing is certain: in the future organizational environments the server side technologies will be mostly Data services that are accessed by a RIA environment. JSP/JSF/ASP.NET environments will fade away leaving a unified model of Markup + Scripting as the Presentation Tier/ User Interface technology of choice. It is slick city folks.
