Direct RIA: Future of RIA

More choices, difficult decision

Though enterprises can benefit from Rich Internet applications, adopting new technologies can also introduce risk. The first problem is how to choose the right solution as it is easy to make a wrong decision because of too many choices, unclear criteria, and complex requirements.

Productivity or Controllability

RIA solutions can be generally classified into two categories - client centric or server-centric. Client-centric frameworks are like manually transmission car which provide more control, but requires more effort. Unlike client-centric frameworks, server-centric frameworks are like auto transmission cars which is easy, thus, they can boost developer's productivity by making AJAX technology transparent to developers. But, which to choose remains a headache. Full control or productivity? Can we benefit from both of them at the same time? The best case is that they can choose either way to satisfy different requirements like manually auto-transmission car!

Direct RIA = client+server fusion approach

Direct RIA enables a revolutionary client+server fusion approach which attempts to leverage benefits of productivity and controllability at the same time.programming when they require full customization, or more responsiveness.

Architecture Overview of Direct RIA

Direct RIA is a server-centric solution plus optional client-side programming. If you take a look at the following diagram, you can see that in the server-centric programming model allow developers to build the Web application using pure server-side code. The server-side engine will generate required HTML, and JavaScript code automatically. Then, the client-side engine will interact with the DOM tree to refresh the content. Moreover, the synchronization between the browser and the server is automated by the corporation of the client-side, and server-side Ajax engines. Thus, developers can focus on the application itself instead of the complex Ajax technologies.

However, one of the major disadvantages of pure server-centric programming model is that developers cannot fully control the presentation of user interface. To overcome this issue, Direct RIA enables an optional client-side programming model that enables developers to write client code to control the user interface directly if necessary.