Rich Internet Applications are basically those that are feature rich documents that combine the powers of Animation, videos and basically multimedia to provide the user with better experience and enhanced usability.

Aligning to this platform a lot of companies have been developing compelling applications such that it provide greater UI’s and user experience than conventional applications. Today companies like Riya have been using this technology in their online shopping portal LIKE and Fashion sites like Fashioniq, Endless have used tools like Flex to provide for richer user experience.

So what is this buzz on RIA development all about. RIA’s are basically done with minimal interaction between the presentation layer and the business layer of any given application. The layman’s term is that results of any selection are displayed without the refreshing of the pages loaded to the front end. For doing this kind of Rich Internet applications development, tools like Flex 2, Apollo, Open Laszlo and the soon to be released WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) have been extensively used.

Each of these tools are know for its advantages and disadvantages that we can get to analyze as separate posts. But the availability of such tools makes applications dynamic and increase the stickiness of the traffic to the particular site. With the advent of Web 2.0 RIA’s are the in-thing in this market. Developers are looking at possibilities to converge the functionalities of different applications using newer tools like Ruby on Rails and so on. Similarly there is a lot happening in the developer community working towards combining the open source initiatives using Open Laszlo and also the interactive nature of Ajax. With the advent of WPF in the same levels the competition is all set to heat up. Only time will tell!