2009 RIA Technology Trends

Since we are starting a new year, many of you like me, may start thinking about what technology will empower 2009's Rich Internet Applications. Various bloggers posted charts and there are even sites dedicated to doing those stats. I am not going to put charts here along with the usual disclaimer explaining that indicators are and will remain indicators. Instead I’ll provide links and info on how to have your own opinion and discuss it here.

Let’s first go thru a list of indicators that can be used.

• Book sales: this indicator is used by O’Reilly and you can see their stats on O'REILLY Radar.
• Number of pages containing the word: you can easily get access to that information from Google trends or using Yahoo API and the TIOBE Index will provide a consolidated from all search engines.
• Number of job posting: A couple of sites can give you access to that information: Indeed or SimplyHired
• Number of Hits on specific sites: you can see what LangPop.com did to give you ideas.

Once you have indicators you can start using them with some keywords. For example you can try to compare Flex, Silverlight and Ajax. Or compare Ruby on Rails, Python Django and ASP.net MVC. The fact is that RIA applications have a client side and server side technology so you should really end up with 2 lists even though not all combinations are possible.

Whether an indicator is valuable or not is up to you but I guess that if you’re looking for a job, the job postings indicator will probably tell you on which technology to concentrate on even though it might not be the most popular.

Here are my forecast for 2009:

• I think that for the UI XHTML/CSS/JavaScript will remains on top, followed by Flex and Silverlight (Omitting JavaFX, XUL, Curl as they are small).
• For the backend Java and .net seems to come first, with Java going down and .net going up. Second place would be PHP and third place Python Django, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion with Ruby and Python rising.

Feel free to post your own as undoubtedly my forecasts are biased :D

Scio Consulting Partners with Apprenda for Rapid SaaS Product Enablement

It is now official, Scio Consulting has partnered with Apprenda to offer SaaS enablement services using Apprenda’s cloud OS “SaaSGrid”. You can read more about the partnership on the company blog and you can read more about SaaSGrid here.
Among other things, that platform is built with SOA in mind and will allow us to not only build ASP.net Ajax applications but Silverlight and Flex RIA leveraging WCF services. And all that without having to worry about billing, multi-tenancy, subscription management and so on, as those are bundled with SaaSGrid.
So well, expect to see, reviews, tutorials and code samples soon…

Welcome

As you may have have noticed, SaaS is becoming increasingly popular even though it's not really new. I've been working with SaaS for quite some time now along with Rich Internet Applications using all sorts of technology (Ajax, Gears, Flex, Air and more recently Silverlight).
Just following the trend, I am going to create yet another acronym "RIAaaS" which stands for Rich Internet Applications sold as a Service in the hope that this term will one day become popular just like SaaS, PaaS or DBaaS.
This blog is going to talk about RIA, SaaS and how they work together.