Rebuilding e-mail
EarthLink, an Atlanta-based Internet service provider, is using open-source tools from Laszlo Systems to rebuild its HTML-based Web e-mail application into a rich Internet application, says John Foltz, EarthLink's product manager for e-mail and for the rich Internet application.
"Web mail in general -- including ours -- is built with HTML, which means it looks and behaves like a series of Web pages. It makes it awkward to use and slow," he says. "Rich Internet technology will allow users to send or receive mail in the background while they're doing something else. Once the application loads up in your browser window . . . there are no more page refreshes."
EarthLink plans this month to wrap up development of the beta product of its rich Internet application, which already has 3.5 million users.
Vendors, meanwhile, are readying rich Internet tools with an eye toward the developer. Laszlo, which markets an open-source platform for developing rich Internet applications, in July announced plans to team with IBM to propose an IDE project to the Eclipse Foundation that would let developers use the open-source Eclipse tools to build rich Internet applications. Laszlo debuted its open source OpenLaszlo tools this month, and they have been downloaded more than 60,000 times, according to company officials.
Peter O'Kelly, an analyst at Burton Group, says Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and other rich Internet programming techniques represent a tacit acknowledgement that programming HTML pages was "cruel and unusual punishment" for developers.
"It used to require some very advanced development to build Web applications," he says. "Mainstream developers can take advantage of these new capabilities without being annoyed with things like the fact that Internet Explorer does things one way but Firefox does it another way. It is about raising the level of abstraction, so developers don't have to understand the plumbing."
Macromedia announced plans last week to restructure its licensing model for its Flex programming tools and eliminate the requirement that enterprises must buy its presentation server in order to get the development software, says Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product management.
The company also announced new technology that will support data streaming, so a user could, for example, get immediate notification when a stock trade clears or another transaction is processed.
In addition, the technology is designed to let users do contextual collaboration, he says. For example, a user looking at a business intelligence dashboard could chat online with the analyst who prepared the data for the dashboard, and the two users could work together to change data, Whatcott says.
Atlas to support AJAX
Microsoft became the latest vendor manoeuvering to tap the rich Internet application market last month when it gave a developer preview of Atlas, the codename for a new Web client framework to allow developers to build AJAX-style applications. Atlas will include extensions to ASP.Net 2.0 that can be accessed through Visual Studio 2005.
Microsoft is targeting companies such as Southern Co, an Atlanta-based power company.
According to Michael Peters, a technical consultant at Southern, the rule of thumb at the company is this: if the application needs a rich interface, it stays client/server. If not, the developers build a Web application.
Southern started moving applications to the Web more than four years ago. The company has two client/server applications with more than 150 screens that it's converting from SQLWindows to .Net-based client/server, rather than Web-based applications, because it's less expensive to do the line-by-line conversion than to rearchitect the applications, Peters says.
Gregory Floyd, a technical consultant at Southern, said that with AJAX, developers can write less than an eighth of the code now needed for building rich interfaces. AJAX is most useful with retrieving information for users in near real time, he says.
What makes them RICH
Key characteristics of rich Internet applications:
- Must be access by the user without a separate installation process
- Must support local application processing on the client
- Must support an event-driven user interface that extends beyond the traditional page request/response model of HTML
- Must support connectivity and synchronization with server-side processing
- Must be usable in bandwidth-constrained network environments like dial-up
- Should provide a "high-fidelity" user interface that matches the look and fell of a desktop GUI
- Should operate efficiently within multiple browsers and on multiple operating systems