RIA is already excelling in B2C environment with all sorts of applications being developed on it. Adobe AIR, Flex, JavaFX has contributed heavily to its popularity with their capability to animate, 3D UI with simple programming and lot many other things.

Enterprise applications’ RIA requirements are different than B2C applications. Enterprise RIA applications need complex graphics (charts, pie diagrams) and reports, large data sets, offline and online support through sync feature, high scalability, SOA and standards, platform independence, high performance, better security, and manageability with ease.

Curl is catering to enterprise RIA audience through its language built for text, graphics to computational logic. Curl has JIT compiler that compiles Curl applications to the native client hardware for fast runtime performance.

Curl offers better performance, better visualization, and low cost support. With proper development vendor enterprises can reap all its benefits.

The web world is becoming more and more demanding. Now, 7 out of 10 projects demand rich internet application (RIA). Since RIAs are bridging the gap between desktop and web applications they have become the topic of talk. RIA has taken web applications to a new level where it is difficult to distinguish web and desktop application interface. The user feels like he is using his desktop application.

The RIA frameworks that has made this possible are Flex, JavaFX, Air, and Curl. At e-Zest we work in all of these technologies. Recently, we have evaluated feasibility of these technologies for the development of rich internet application project.

Here is the brief and crisp finding of our feasibility study.

When it comes to a UI controls Flex, Air and Curl have it built-in. Swing comes to rescue when you want to use JavaFX for UI controls. In Flex and Air you can have your own controls. Eclipse can be used as IDE for all these technologies.

To be able to run your application at client user needs to have plugins and extensions. For Flex you require Flash plugin which is available readily on 90% of browsers relieving user from downloading and installing plugin for application use. JavaFX requires Java plugin with JavaFX extension to run application. For AIR, user requires to download Adobe Integrated Runtime environment to be able to use application in online and offline mode. For CURL a CURL runtime engine is required.

BlazeDS, a free and open source Java solution, can provide higher performing approach to connection Flex applications to back-end services. BlazeDS includes both Flex Remoting, which provides binary, serialized data transport, and Flex messaging services, offering real-time data push.

The JavaFX platform provides an essential set of tools and technologies that enable developers and designers to collaborate, create, and deploy applications with expressive content to browsers and desktops. Mobile application developers can use the JavaFX Mobile Emulator to preview applications for mobile devices using the JavaFX platform.

AIR are actually desktop application using system resources but they have all necessary ingredient to be called as feature rich RIA. AIR is becoming popular for social application extensions. When it comes to business and enterprise solution CURL applications tend to work well as they have excellent data-handling capabilities and good information presentation features. In addition, while Curl isn't as focused on animation and graphics as some other RIA platforms are, it does do a good job when it comes to data analysis and reporting graphics. Since Curl has been around for 10 years, it has a well-established base of users and support, too.

We are still evaluating Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform (RAP). Once we do that we will post about that.

This week an open cloud manifesto has got published with intent of beginning a conversation in the direction of formulating principles for open cloud computing. The companies behind drafting this open cloud manifesto are of an opinion that innovations happening in cloud computing area in terms of standards, interoperability, integration and portability should be guided by the principles of openness.

The manifesto has covered topics like importance and need of cloud computing today and challenges and barriers for its adoption. The cloud computing manifesto has identified goals like availability of choices, flexibility in cloud computing usage, speed and agility to respond quickly to changes and open cloud computing skills. This all should help building a foundation for open standards and architecture for cloud computing.

The initiative is criticized by Microsoft calling it as a secret cloud manifesto. A blog attributed to Steven Martin, senior director of platform product management, has said in its post that the document was asked to sign 'as is' without modification or additional input. Though Microsoft admits that there should be standardization, it feels that it is too early to do that. Amazon supported the initiative and Google is yet to comment on it.

The responses from Microsoft, Amazon and Google will be helpful in guiding the future path for this open cloud manifesto.