Canoo RIA Newsletter - Issue No. 3

Welcome to the Summer '08 issue and a refreshing round-up of RIA links.

Canoo highlights:
In May, Canoo exhibited and presented two talks at JavaOne, the world's largest conference on Java, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

A brand-new and exciting version of UltraLightClient is available. See the introductory video at the website.

Best regards,
Sandra Wendland

Forrester's Stefan Ried discusses user experience and expectations, pointing out how important it is to study user roles based on the persona approach. Grouping potential users according to their usage intensity can help to understand how they will relate to an application. So-called "power users" are employees that use an application on a regular basis to deliver much of their daily work.

Factors power users will appreciate:

• fast performance of the user interface,
• immediate data validation,
• keyboard shortcuts.

Ried suggests that application vendors will look for "Java-based, non-Ajax RIA platforms".

Hans-Dirk Walter presents the factors to consider when introducing RIA in a business environment in this press article (in German only). He discusses the main evaluation criteria and points out the benefits of using a browser-dependent versus a browser-independent runtime environment. His main argument: Web browsers were not built to run complex business applications and will limit the performance of Javascript applications.

riamap (http://www.riamap.net) is a Canoo sample application that shows how a community may collect and sort information on a specific topic. The application maps the world of Rich Internet Applications. Unlike mere information aggregators on the topic, it builds on user contributions to assemble a list of current RIA technologies, and how they relate to each other. The sample application shows typical Web 2.0 features such as tagging and inline editing.

SlideRocket (http://www.sliderocket.com/) is an online tool to build and show presentations. The application uses Adobe's Flash, Flex, and AIR technologies and shows how a typical office application may be distributed in the near future.