The Evolution of the Rich Internet Application to Adobe Flex 2

This content requires Flash

To view this content, JavaScript must be enabled, and you need the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player.

Video Transcript

Welcome to Total Training for Adobe Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications. I am James Talbot and I have written books on Flex, I have authored Rich Internet Applications for Fortune 500 companies and I have been an employ of Macromedia and now Adobe for six years. In this lesson we will begin to understand what a Rich Internet Application is, also known as a RIA and how the Adobe Flex 2 family of products and the Adobe Flash Player 9 help in constructing them. We will also examine the process of how the MXML and ActionScript code you write is transformed into a SWF file that is delivered to the client.

A Rich Internet Application, an RIA combines the best functionality of a Desktop Software Application with the broad reach and low cost deployment of web applications. In the early days of computing, applications started off is being completely text based 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 applications that were moved from a mainframe to a client-server system often failed because developers often just converted the same text based applications without taking advantage of the new format.

In order to exploit a whole new paradigm you need to approach problems differently. Client-server applications were extremely powerful but required huge amounts of maintenance because every time a change a code every single client machine had to be updated. This soon became unwieldy. With the move to web applications there was actually a step backward in terms of functionality but web applications saved a lot of time because changes only had to be made at the server level. But the ever more powerful client machine essentially became a dumb terminal.

Rich Internet Applications have all of the benefits of a client-server type development environment but none of the maintenance hassles because they are delivered to the Flash Player which is installed on almost every single computer. Adobe has perfected the distribution of this player and Flash Player 8 has been the most widely distributed piece of software in computing history. The Auto Update feature is a Flash Player 8 will ensure that Flash Player 9 is distributed even faster.

With Rich Internet Applications, every user interaction doesn't require a request, web server response and data can be obtained from the server without redrawing the entire page. RIAs are able to efficiently utilize 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 50% during the check out process.