MyLineRider

Ryan Stuart, an Adobe Evangelist, has came up with his 10 RIA predictions for the year. Besides been an interesting read, I think he has some good points in there. RIA capabilities are improving rapidly because of the strong competition between Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe is very well positioned with the Flash platform and all the products in its portfolio, but Microsoft is a giant with a lot of followers in the development community.

At the end, the competition is good for the development community and for the end users. For the development community because we will have more tools - a better arsenal to produce great solutions, both for the web and for the desktop. For the end-users because, hopefully, there will be better and more efficient and effective web-based applications with improved UI design and navigation.

I believe in 2008 there will be a boom in visualization-collaboration applications. Ryan touches on those tow points in his predictions. I should add, that the integration “collaborative visualization” will be exploding as well. Currently there a few interesting web-based visualization applications like IBM Many Eyes created in Java and Gapminder, a Google product (acquired) made with Open Source Flash tools, and a few others. However, there collaborative capabilities are very basic, and they display visualizations from static data sources only.

Ryan did not mention any predictions about RIAs in mobile devices. I don’t know much about mobile devices, cell phones and PDAs, but I think there computational power, memory and storage capacity are reaching a point were they will be as powerful as basic computers and will be able to run Flash Player 9 and maybe Silverlight. Currently, only a handful of them support Flash Player 9, but I think this will change in 2008.

One thing is for sure, we have an exciting year a head of us…