Rich Internet Applications ( RIA)

Rich Internet Applications ( RIA) are those web applications that have the features and functionality of desktop applications. Rich internet applications are similer to normal web applications in the sense that

1. Rich internet application run in a web browser. It does not require the software installation.
2. Rich internet application run in sandbox

There are some organizations which are promoting the term RIA , One of them is Macromedia( formally Adobe ), Macromedia is the orgaization who introduced the term RIA.

Compared to normal web applications having client-server architecture, Rich internet applications have benifit over those. In the normal web application , All the processing take place on the server side and client is only used to display static text. For every task, data need to be send to server, server should process it and send back the result to the client lead to page reloading. Rich internet applications uses client side technology for executing instructions locally on client side and hence improve the performence.

What makes it Rich internet applications is to have rich features like drag & drop , slider to change data and more. There are some terms which are used under the rich internet applications. These are Flash, AJAX, CSS, ActiveX controls, Java Applets, Java applications using java webstart, XHTML.

The only problem with rich internet applications is that they run on the sandox, so limited system resources can be accessed. Since Java script is some time required, if java script is disabled, then it may be problem running rich internet application.

The use of rich internet applications is increasing becuase it gives a feel of desktop applications in to a web application.