Internet and Technology

Since my very first Adobe Max conference five years ago, the then Macromedia (before their acquisition by Adobe) were talking about Rich Internet Applications or RIA’s as the future of the Web. At the time they had recently launch Flex 1 and were predicting a very different Web experience for the end user.

5 years later and I have to ask myself whether the end user’s experience of Web has change that dramatically. Apart from the massive amount of video content that is available today, the majority of websites are still produced using HTML and only companies with endless budgets have been able to produce glimpses of Adobe’s vision. So was Adobe wrong in their prediction? No, I think they were spot on, but the main problem was that the software did not exist which would allow Web designers and developers to build RIA’s.

Flex 1, by Adobe’s own admission, was a crude first attempt at creating RIA’s. Flex 3 by comparison is a much better program, but there is still a problem. Flex is a developer’s program, its internal language is Flash ActionScript. Therefore unless you are familiar with ActionScript or you are a coder and like learning computer languages then Flex is probably not a tool the average Web Designer will adopt.

Even larger Web production houses with teams of graphic designers and developers found the work-flows, moving from the designers vision into the back end development, confusing and frustrating.

Fortunately all of these issues may soon be a thing of the past. Without a doubt the most talked about product at Adobe Max 2008 was a new Flash Catalyst program. Even though Flash Catalyst will only be released in 2009, you get the feeling Adobe is so excited about it they simply could not wait to tell us.

So what is Flash Catalyst? Well essentially it’s a designer’s tool which will really simplify the RIA work flow process between Designers and Developers. Designers for the first time will have a program where they can import all of their artwork from programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash and then design the fully functional RIA interface. As the back-end will still need to be coded by a developer, the key distinction with Flash Catalyst is that designers can save all their work in a format that a developer can easily understand and work with.

This is indeed an exciting new change, the work-flow within the Web community, and designers should be excited about picking up a copy of Flash Catalyst in 2009.

Create events for desktop and rich internet applications Events are very important to create rich and high-fidelity application wireframes, and thus their creation and managing must be as simple as possible. Event triggers are events that may occur during the simulation of a prototype and that cause event actions to execute. The Justinmind Prototyper® provides several event triggers: OnClick, OnDoubleClick, OnRightClick, onKeyPressed, OnMouseOver, OnMouseEnter, OnMouseLeave, OnPageLoadOn, PageUnload and OnChange. Event actions are the processing that takes place when an event triggers. Several actions can be defined for the same trigger upon the same element so that they are taken sequentially. Event actions are: Link to, Execute Action, Set Connection, Hide/Show, Change Style, Enable/Disable, Set Focus on, Set Value. Creating a tab menu In order to create a tabbed layout we recommend you to work with the Layered box widget which is able to display several layers one above the other and switch their visibility using events.

Simulating a tooltip A dynamic tooltip can be easily simulated following the next steps:

Component libraries and examples Justinmind has prototyped a set of component libraries and examples to help you better understand the power of our wireframing and simulation tool. You can find the examples and component libraries here.

Harness the Benefits of Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex

The current economy notwithstanding, today’s business market is a competitive place.  Customers are becoming more demanding and competing brands are getting more difficult to ignore. The overall value of effective branding cannot be overestimated as more and more consumers are motivated to shop based on their familiarity with your name, your logo, and your reputation. Moreover, we’re in an era where the marketing industry is more dynamic than ever and new media and technologies are changing the way we establish said brands. The internet has made the consumer far more fickle but also more difficult to engage which is why rich internet applications (RIA) are a cornerstone of many modern marketing campaigns. With RIA, the customer experience is fuller and more affecting as many RIA require the total engagement of the customer.  In short, RIA help you to create a much more memorable brand experience which will ultimately equate to more stability and greater profit for your organization.

Engaging the Customer

Of course, from a marketing standpoint, engaging your customer with your advertisements is critical. Throughout the evolution of marketing, advertising, and branding, professionals in the industry have gained a greater acceptance and understanding of the notion that in order to influence a customer to buy your product, you must first make some kind of connection with them. As we have seen the predominant marketing media change from radio and print to television to the internet, we have also seen a change in the way advertising seeks to make this connection.  In the early days of branding, companies generally sought to gain connect to customers by providing information. Customers were also given a sense that their choices were important and it was especially important not to make the wrong choice. As television became more central in our lives, branding was a matter of arousing a strong and influential emotional response that would later be associated with the brand thereby making it far more memorable. But as advertising and branding focus has shifted to online mediums, we are seeing the importance of consumer engagement skyrocketing.  With the multitude of sensory input we face on any given day, our attention spans have become shorter. RIA can help you to engage your customers in such a way that they give you their focus. They learn about your brand, product or service while engaged by your RIA.

Reaching the Customer

Business executives are quickly learning the value of engaging your customers. Recent research suggests that customer engagement translates directly into customer loyalty. RIA are interesting and dynamic and are developing quickly. But RIA are more than marketing tools for improving customer engagement, with RIA you can also reach customers across a broad spectrum of sources. Mobile web, for example, is becoming increasingly popular. With applications like Adobe Flex and Flash, developers can create interesting, highly engaging applications that can reach the vast majority of mobile web users. In addition, we all know that web presence is international and once you commit to branding online, RIA are the only way you are going to keep up with your competitors.  The fact of the matter is that as online technologies are getting more sophisticated there are more people going online. Any organization that did not adapt to these changing technologies, in this case creating RIA with Adobe Flex, will be left behind.

Impressing the Customer

In addition to engaging and reaching customers, RIA can help you impress customers. As an example here are the details of an experience anyone can relate to. You’re searching the web for a product you want to buy. You stumble across two websites. One of those sites features black and white text and a crude online ordering form. The other website features eye-popping applications with streaming video and a well organized home page. Ask yourself which site you’d be more likely to buy from and also more likely to trust. Trust is an important element for consumers today and one of the great benefits of RIA is that they help make your site look professional while also achieving the lofty goals of engagement and reach. Moreover, as RIA can easily incorporate a variety of rich media, like embedded video or contextual help, they allow for better configurations.

The Specific Adobe Benefits

Perhaps the most important benefit of developing RIA with Adobe products is ubiquity.  Without a doubt, Adobe Flash is the world leader as far as its ability to reach internet-enabled desktops. In fact, it is estimated that 98% of computers with internet capability run Adobe Flash meaning the development tools like Adobe AIR or Adobe Flex provide you with the opportunity to create ubiquitous RIA. Furthermore, most designers and developers already have the skills necessary to start working with technologies like Flex and as these technologies evolve the developer experience doesn’t change all that much.  In a very short time developers and designers can adapt to these new technologies, in fact most already are.

RIA are a relatively new addition to the repertoire of marketing tools but they are already highly influential in terms of engaging, reaching, and impressing your customers.  Furthermore, Adobe technologies allow designers and developers to work together seamlessly within the bounds of their current skill set. Creating rich, meaningful online applications makes your brand unforgettable and as such you can’t afford to ignore the potential of RIA.

Rich internet application increases the overall productivity of the website and consequently provides a rich user experience for the visitors. It adds a flexibility to your web pages making them more alive, interactive and responsive. In simple language, rich internet application provides a richer online experience to the visitors and customers. Apart from providing you a cutting edge to your present business, RIA can deliver some of the best solutions.

The technology behind rich internet application is not very complicated and is easy to learn, understand and follow. Combined with innovation, it can be used efficiently to enhance the website. It can be worked on to develop it for higher productivity.

Rich internet application is a relatively old concept and was more popular under different names like remote scripting, X Internet and others. The term was formally introduced in March 2002 in a Macromedia White Paper.

There are four primary means for providing RIA capabilities: Flash VM-based approaches; approaches that use JavaScript and HTML, also known as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), approaches that use Java applets or ActiveX controls; and Custom-developed Client Code developed with Java or .NET languages.

Benefits

? With custom website development experience, one gets the advantage of refreshing a part of a page rather than the complete page. The data is transferred from the form to the server without making the user wait

? Rich internet application mainly works on asynchronous mode which helps reduce the network traffic, thus increasing the performance level. It also takes less bandwidth.

? It helps create visually appealing images enhancing their overall look and appeal

? It helps in the broader reach by helping individuals to access applications anytime and from anywhere

? Rich internet application also helps immediate and interactive communication through messengers and video conferences among others

The benefits cannot be ignored. Even if we look at things from the business point of view, web application development helps increase visitor satisfaction. When you are able to engage your customers with the presentation and functionality of your website, the chances of winning long term loyal customers is higher. This holds true for the businesses that are majorly conducted online like e-commerce and banking among others.

However, it is to be kept in mind to opt for experts when looking at enhancing the website with rich internet experience. Today, there are a whole lot of options available where you can outsource the project to IT companies. However, it should be ensured that the company finalized should have experience of similar projects to show. Different companies specialize in different technologies so opt for the one closest to your requirements.

If we look at the future, rich internet application has high scope of growth. It can be explored further combined creative and innovation ideas for better usability and at the same time keeping up with the growing contemporary industry trends.

Adobe Flex is comparable to OpenLaszlo, Ajax, XUL, JavaFX and Silverlight. It uses MXML to lay out user interfaces for browser applications. Interaction is achieved through ActionScript, the core language of Flash Player. The Flex SDK provides interface components such as buttons, list boxes, trees, data grids, text controls, and layout containers. It is however a fully fledged development environment for a programmer and thus not as easy to use as for example OpenLaszlo. In principle you do need to get into programming to do anything pratical in FLEX.

We did something very different with our Papyrus EYE user interface. We defined a powerful graphics component set that is stored in the Papyrus WebRepository as models and implemented them in a QT-based library for PC applications, with native Flash Actionscript. We plan to implement it in AJAX too eventually. Because of WebRepository GUI deployment is fully version controlled and just-in-time with any other changes. The execution of Papyrus EYE calls a series of special PQL (Papyrus Query Language) commands from the Flash Player that dynamically present GUI information into the Flash player. All GUI components are dynamically loaded at runtime and no preloading of a compiled functionality (like i.e. in OpenLaszlo) is necessary.

Papyrus EYE makes the development of completely dynamic user frontends in the browser much easier than Flex. More importantly, ISIS has extended the full application life-cycle management to the user interface!

The Papyrus WebRepository manages all aspects of consolidated service applications across ECM, BPM, CRM, and ERP. IT enables business professionals to define and maintain powerful applications without programming that link into back end business applications with SOA or other message based interfaces. An application consists of metadata definitions that control the data federation from the service interfaces, business rules, the EYE user frontend, inbound and outbound business content, business rules, as well as trained business processes.

Flex 3 with Java is a new book from Packt that guides developers in building rich web applications using the Flex 3 framework. Written by Satish Kore, a Flex enthusiast and evangelist, this book helps readers build an end-to-end Flex e-commerce application using all major features of Flex 3.

Flex is an effective, free open source framework used to develop Rich Internet Applications for browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and a program model that supports common design patterns.

Developers will learn to build Flex applications with ActionScript 3.0, BlazeDS 3.2, and Java. This book will help readers mix ActionScript and MXML language to write Flex applications and use Flex Builder 3 and Ant Script to package them. Readers will be able to debug their applications, design CSS files, use data access methods, use RPC services and create custom components.

Flex users will learn to build a sample book explorer application with XML using the E4X approach, and use Adobe LiveCycle Data Services and BlazeDS components for accessing server-side data. Using Resource Manager class, they will localize Flex applications and with internationalization techniques they will be able to customize the application for multiple locales. They will also discover data access methods such as HTTPService, WebService, and RemoteObjects with code examples

Java developers, professionals or system analysts interested in developing Rich Internet Applications using Flex 3 will find this book useful. This book is out now and is available from Packt. For more information, please visit http://www.packtpub.com/flex-3-with-java/book

DOTNUTSHELL Technologies is at the forefront in creating attractive and affordable web solutions for our clients. We can build simple websites to advanced and intelligent web sites using AI and predictive software systems.

There are many aspects (design concerns) in this process, and due to the rapid development of the Internet, new aspects may emerge. For non-commercial websites, the goals may vary depending on the desired exposure and response. For typical commercial Web sites, the basic aspects of design are:

The content: The substance, and information on the site should be relevant to the site and should target the area of the public that the website is concerned with.

The usability: The site should be user-friendly, with the interface and navigation simple and reliable.

The appearance: The graphics and text should include a single style that flows throughout, to show consistency. The style should be professional, appealing and relevant.

The visibility: The site must also be easy to find via most, if not all, major search engines and advertisement media.

A Web site typically consists of text and images. The first page of a website is known as the Home page or Index. Some websites use what is commonly called a Splash Page. Splash pages might include a welcome message, language/region selection, or disclaimer. Each web page within a Web site is an HTML file which has its own URL. After each Web page is created, they are typically linked together using a navigation menu composed of hyperlinks. Faster browsing speeds have led to shorter attention spans and more demanding online visitors and this has resulted in less use of Splash Pages, particularly where commercial websites are concerned.

More info on FLASH based rich internet applications can be found on our website.