Re: Adobe's RIA Technologies

We're back to thick client-server architecture, and stand-alone desktop settings.

For Java, this solely depends on your application architecture. You don't necessarily need to have all or most of the application code on the client. You can build the classical "thick" client / server application with most of the app code (business logic etc) on the client and only use the server for the database. Or you could put only the "presentation" logic on the client, for a more "thin" client ./ server approach. Or you could even simply run the application on the host with no application specific code on the pc, where the host application drives the presentation on the client (the PC that is) ala green screen as/400 apps. The Java platform itself does not imply a specific application architecture or distribution strategy. This depends on the way the application has been designed. Of course, to build an application which is distributed between a host (or server) like the as/400 and several PC's one needs to have some infrastructural code, in the form of some framework. You don't want to code this supporting code specifically for one application. There are several frameworks to support different architectures. If you choose for example the standard J2EE stack you are mostly forced two use either a "web based" interface or - with a java desktop app on the client - a "thick" client approach. But the Java platform itself does not inhibit any architecture.

Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:44:29 -0700
From: nandelin@xxxxxxxxx
To: web400@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [WEB400] Adobe's RIA Technologies

From: john e
The first RIA platform is JavaSE from Sun ...

It's interesting that you came to that conclusion. I was doing more research on Adobe's web site last night, trying to answer the questions I posed in earlier emails, and began seeing the many similarities between Flex-Flash and Java Applets. The architecture is essentially the same. Adobe even offers a desktop runtime named Air which enables Flex-Flash applications to be permanantly deployed to the desktop and run stand-alone. We're back to thick client-server architecture, and stand-alone desktop settings.

Flex visual components are defined using a declarative language similar to JSF, but named MXML in Adobe's case. The Flex compiler generates ActionScript from MXML, which is converted to byte code, which runs in the Flash player, which has a Jit process that converts byte code to x86 machine instructions. So you begin to see the many similarities with Java desktop architecture. I'm beginning to see that Adobe RIA's are really desktop applications, but deployed over the web.

It's more clear to me why web portals become less useful in the case of Flex-Flash applications, and the motivation to embed some sort of menu system within the applications themselves, including logic to toggle between multiple concurrent applications. Portals typically use or elements for separate applications, but in the case of Adobe's RIA's that would mean launching multiple instances of the Flash runtime, which would be highly resource intensive - something akin to running multiple JVM instances.

This is something of a shock to me because it's in such stark contrast to my ideology for enterprise class systems.

Nathan.




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