Today, there is a high demand for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIAs combine the maturity, stability and scalability of service orientation with state of the art presentation layer technology to create the next wave of web based distributed applications. RIA applications are defined as the combination of beautiful aesthetics and the feel of desktop applications with the accessibility feature of the web applications. These applications include several features which counter the disadvantages of traditional websites. For an end user, RIA applications serves the best of client-server and web technology, making it imperative for all the small and mid-size businesses, large scale enterprises and even government entities to adopt.

RIAs are implemented into a working system to provide better results to all visitors. These applications are designed, executed and implemented with a view of increasing the overall productivity of the website. By adding RIAs, website developers append a number of flexible features to a website and make it more vivid and alive. With RIAs, websites become more appealing, interactive and responsive and hence have become cutting edge solutions to enhance the way a business operates.

Currently websites and desktops are rapidly moving in the RIA application development direction. Flex development along with many other platforms is used to add RIA applications to a website. In the present world many different types of platforms are available – Adobe Flex/Air, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), JavaFX and Microsoft Silverlight. Each have some of the best features making it difficult to judge which one is the best.

Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex applications are different from each other in many respects, even though they are developed in a way, look very much similar. Flex development is the process of using a collection of web tools, technologies and run time environments to create better RIA solutions. It includes Adobes Integrated Runtime (AIR), Flex SDK and Add-on Components, Adobe Flash Player Runtime, Flex Builder and Server Side Integration Service.

One of the reasons Adobe Flex has become so popular is because of its versatility. Adobe Flex is a software development kit (SDK) based on the Adobe Flash platform. Adobe Flex is used for the development and deployment of cross-platform RIA. The additional advantage of Adobe Flex is that it is an open source framework and by using flex compiler and adobe Flash builder RIAs can be easily developed. Flex development encourages better presentation of business information through rich graphical presentations, multimedia and animated displays. It is a program that can do extraordinary things. Adobe Flex can help build a website from the ground up or if you are trying to design intricate animations, design a highly interactive application or building interfaces for a variety of users, build on existing code or starting over from scratch.

Flex offers a number of remarkable benefits for both developers and end-users, including:

· Record development time due to powerful coding tools and extensive visual component library

· Innumerable good features make it ideal to develop enterprise level applications.

· Solution scalability and reliability due to a powerful and elegant Flex programming model.

· Flex-based solutions are easily re-designed or enhanced whenever it is necessary.

· Easy integration into a server application due to a high-performance data synchronization engine between the client and server sides.

· In-context interactivity due to video, audio, streaming, and messaging components.

· Flex components like Charts, DataGrid, RichTextEditor, ProgressBar, Accordion, Slider etc make Flex development very easy.

All this makes Adobe Flex one of the best RIA development platforms. RIAs have since been widely adopted and proven to deliver tangible ROI to the businesses that deploy them. Measurable benefits include higher customer conversion rates, increased user productivity and improved customer loyalty.

e-Zest’s (www.e-zest.net) dedicated team of (RIA) experts has extensive experience in building interactive & efficient Rich Internet Applications (RIA) development solutions to a global client base. e-Zest offers services that enable its clients to effectively communicate and share their ideas, products and services with their global customers. Our RIA services include Adobe Flex & AIR, Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Microsoft Silverlight, CURL, OpenLaszlo and JavaFX. We offer custom solutions according to needs of the clients.

Liferay Portal is the world's leading enterprise open source portal framework, offering integrated web publishing and content management, an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA) to facilitate application integration, and compatibility with all major IT infrastructures. Liferay portal is one of the most mature portal frameworks in the market. It has proven real world performance with Fortune 500 customers across industries. It offers many key business benefits that involve personalization, customization, and workflow. Liferay Portal provides within a secure, administrated framework, an ability to organize the potential chaos of an unfettered Web 2.0 environment. It empowers users with tools such as blogs, instant emails, message boards, instant messaging, shared calendar, social networking, social office, CMS, WCM, and so on.

Liferay portal provides you a single point of access to all your organization’s data, content, and information from both existing in-house applications (i.e., HR, CRM) and external sources. Liferay Portal is the only open source portal that works with any application server, database server, or operating system with over 700 deployment configuration. Liferay’s workflow engine allows organizations of all sizes to be more nimble. Flexible IT makes business processes more dynamic, modular, and adaptable to the demands of fast-changing markets.

Liferay Portal provides the highest value and lowest costs at every level. It also accommodates today’s global business environment with out of the box support for 22 languages. No matter how your processes change, Liferay was benchmarked as among the most secure portal platforms, so you can be always confident in the security of your data.

Created for enterprise use Liferay Portal provides a virtualized space where you can share, centralize and collaborate. Built with the end user in mind, user interface developed using Liferay portal is easy to understand even by technically ignorant user. Companies worldwide have been using Liferay Portal because of its high-end functionality, compatibility with most major application servers and database platforms, and scalability. One can consolidate, organize and access all the data and applications via a single point of access that the Liferay portal provides.

e-Zest’s Liferay Portal solutions, helps its client to minimize the critical operations and support for better customer satisfaction by allowing self-service capabilities and capable portal integration across business services. Our skilled Liferay team is available to satisfy all of your requirements for Liferay deployment, implementation, customization, consulting , Support, and any other services related to Liferay due diligence/requirement analysis, business analysis, Java scripting, implementation of a Liferay Portal, or changes or redesign for an existing Liferay Portal.

Nowadays I am doing requirement gathering and analysis for a good project here in Gibraltar.So you can imagine lot of user interactions ,taking interviews of end-users , sometimes shadowing them to their specific work function and lot of questioning etc are going on…at least project started off good and we are heading in correct direction.

For successful execution of project,the team which is going to implement or code,should get understanding of the ideas and concepts and functionality and thus the need of good mock up tool arise. These tools plays a vital role of explaining the ideas and bringing the life to boring documentation. It is truly said that “1 picture is equivalent to 1000 words!”.

In my previous projects,I had mostly used visio and its sort of standard at my workplace for mockups.Though recently I had also tried out serena prototype composer for one project.These tools have their advantages and disadvantages.

Visio is the huge software.It is not meant just for prototyping or diagramming.However,it comes at a price and it requires a lot of time to starting off and be expert with it.You can find massive features are poured on as just any other Microsoft stable software.After using visio ,I came to a conclusion that visio is good tool ,but still not a very handy tool for creating mockups quickly.

I explored a bit more on internet and found Serena Prototype composer.Serena prototype composer scores over visio ,when you want a clickable prototype.But then serena prototype composer needs to be installed where you want to run your prototype and seems to be pretty rigid kind of a tool.I didn’t like it much though it has unique advantage of creating clickable prototype.

Then again in search of perfect mockup tool,I downloaded and tried many. One day(actually night),when on the verge of just concluding that there is not so much great tool other than visio,I found the gold “Balsamiq Mockups”!!!

As a practice,Without much hopes,I downloaded and installed it.As a authentic software engineer,I never use manuals or help to use software [In fact,I had reached to conclusion that if you need help or manual for running a software,there is a problem with usability of that software]. Firing up balsamiq tools,I was just kind of landed in my dreams!! Since,it is just made for making mockups!!! Very no not friendly,I will say inviting user interface.there are all UI elements at the tops with really big and wide tool strip which shows of drag and drop user elements some common like buttons,text,all types of containers(i.e. group box,tabs etc) and some uncommon like accordion,cover flow,video player,street maps etc.The most surprising is I found sticky[comments as they call it ] and charts and graphs as well.Wow! pretty genius work.Since,many business software always need this and very few people do have mockups for this stuff.

You can create a new mockup and start building your mockup by dragging and dropping these elements.When you drag and drop the vertical and horizontal guard lines appear to assist you for placing the elements,taking care of alignments which is again cool feature.

You can set properties of individual element by selecting the element and then property bar appears out of nowhere.You can drag it anywhere so that it will not disturb you or obscure the view of element that you are working with.Also The properties are fantastic set,Just as what needed no extras .These things truly live “YAGNI(You aren’t gonna Need It!!) agile principal.

On top of this,the mock up you created can be saved or imported as XML file or can be exported as PNG files or pdf or clickable prototype.

Balsamiq Mockups team has really come up with really genius product !!

However,there is a saying that greedy man and end-user can never be satisfied 

The community of Balsamiq Mockups is also good.And they had come up with several templates that you can find at http://www.mockupstogo.net .

All in all,It is insanely great tool built by genius people out there at Balsamiq.I think I can saved at least 40% of time required to create mockups with Basamiq compared to Visio.I will certainly recommend that try your hands on Balsamiq and you will be happy making your mockups ever after. We are also thinking of this tool to be "de-facto" replacement for visio.

BTW,on special note,We just done the event on "Agile" by well known speaker Stephan Forte. He has spoken on Balsamiq for more than 5 minutes in his speech. I think that proves the mettle this tool has!

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.

Today while a post by Phil Wainewright who is very well known technology writer at ZDNet I came across a very convincing definition of Web 3.0. According to him Web 3.0 is technology that brings Web 2.0 and on-demand applications into the enterprise.

Enterprise Mashups is helping world achieve Web 3.0 objective. Some call it composite web application. These mashups will help combine information from enterprise search engines, web services, messaging systems, business intelligence engines and data integration solutions and combine that information from external services from all stakeholders, partners and suppliers and emerging external data sources to deliver the information at one place.

The open Web services and SOAs philosophy for application development is lowering the integration impedances and now applications are able to readily combine all web services into rich new applications. This can be a precursor for the long-awaited arrival of true software reuse.

The development language would not be as important as architecture and future thinking for development of such web applications. The key is to create virtual humanized web applications that will talk, hear and share with each other to provide true electronic communication across the supply chain. The flow towards Web 3.0 development will soon increase.