To relax a little at a time in charge of multiple deliveries and multiple project starts I thought a little RIA would not make me wrong. So I participated in the RIA Business Exchange this morning (excellent organization).
Obviously tech news side I dropped a little but as there were many customer testimonials I could get an idea of feedback and use cases RIA.
To put it simply pushes the Adobe RIAs on the following use cases:
- Business applications (Migration and new applications with SOA backends)
- Decision support (a nice graphic picture is worth a thousand)
- eCommerce, B2C and RichMedia
- Social Networks and Collaboration
Of course all the apps are beautiful - as https://www.photoshop.com/ - with a processing chain design <=> development that is truly optimized for the benefit of users needs: you can make circles and gradients; ->
The release of Catalyst - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/ - will further facilitate the job of the designer who can create his interractions directly functional (eg forms) and go "ready to code" to our friends developers.
Back-office side of LiveCycle galore (we love us a bit right now with LiveCycle Weblogic on Unix but hey we will be patient) with a workflow / BPM coming in LiveCycle.
And users then?
MAAF: Industrialization under Flex
The showcase is the self quote: http://www.maaf.fr/assurances/fr/c_6312/devis-auto-particulier
6 outputs RIAs in 2009, migration objective of the whole legacy (NSDK) to Flex / JBoss
Satisfied users, CIO satisfied, good collaboration design / developers
MAAF remained in an approach seems to "silo" so well with Flex matches at ca.
Other MMA mutual interest as closely to the base.
Orange Vallée: RIA serving the R & D Orange
The windows:
www.wormee.com
www.radiomee.com
www.lifeisbetteron.com
Beautiful example of integrated teams (market + design + development) which take advantage of the ease of design to move fast and good mode iterative prototyping and construction.
Some outstanding issues on perfs and SEO.
One other user happy at the new FT SelfCare with 600,000 connections / day.
My little conclusion (just my 2 cents):
- Flex is MATURE, gone are the days of prototypes and studies,
- RIAs war will not happen: use cases between Flex and GWT are different enough for me:
- Flex: design oriented development
- GWT: development cooperation (with interractions Apps, App Engine, Android)
- Talent Wars will (re) start. Flex developers / JEE does not grow on trees, the GWT either,
- For fans of Gates I think we will arrive at effective solutions with GWT (via Vaadin example). I'm more cautious on couples Portal / Flex (same time I'm not that interested at Adobe).
