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A Rich Internet Application combines the best features of a Desktop application with the broad reach low-cost and deployment of web applications. In the early days of computing, the applications started off as being completely text based and deployed on Mainframe machines. Eventually Client machines became more powerful, and the client-server system of development was born.

It's important to note that as applications move from a Mainframe system to a client-server system, they often failed. Developers would too often just convert the same text-based applications without taking advantage of the new client-server format, and that changed the face of development. In order to exploit a whole new paradigm, you need to approach problems differently.

Client-server applications were extremely powerful when created the right way because they took advantage of the new found power of the Desktop rather than doing everything on the clunky Mainframe server. However, all client-server applications required huge amount of maintenance because every time a change in the application occurred, every single client machine had to be updated. This soon became on unwieldy.

With the move to web applications, there was actually a step backward in functionality because the vast majority of processing happened at the server level. Even for transactions, those sometimes that made more sense to happen at the client, something that's simple as a page refresh. This meant that the ever more powerful client machine essentially became a dump terminal.

Rich Internet Applications have all the benefits of the client-server type of development but none of the maintenance hassles because they were delivered through the Flash Player; the most widely distributed piece of software in the history of the Internet.

Approximately, 98% of all computers worldwide have the Flash Player installed. Adobe has perfected the distribution of this player and Flash Player 9 has ramped up to achieve its over 90% distribution rate faster than any other version of the Flash Player. The Auto-Update features will ensure that future players are distributed even faster.

With Rich Internet Applications, every user interaction doesn't require web-server request response, and data can be obtained from the server without redrawing the entire page. RIAs are able to efficiently use network bandwidth by transmitting only the portion of the data that has actually changed.

Studies have shown that e-commerce sites built as Rich Internet Applications have reduced shopping cart abandonment by upto 50% during the checkout process. The Flex product family provide the next generation of developer tools to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications on the Flash platform.

A Rich Internet Application combines the best features of a Desktop application with the broad reach low-cost and deployment of web applications. In the early days of computing, the applications started off as being completely text based and deployed on Mainframe machines. Eventually Client machines became more powerful, and the... click to read more