The RIA space is white hot. Microsoft, Adobe, the vast number of Ajax frameworks out there and companies like Laszlo Systems, Curl, and Appcelerator are all focused on creating great platforms and applications for rich Internet applications. We might even see JavaFX this year. Back when I did my predictions for this year I said that some of these smaller RIA players would have less than stellar years this year. I stand by that but I wanted to flesh it out a little bit because I think the main reason is tools. And all of these companies can adjust/enhance their offerings by changing the tooling strategy.

Tools are a big part of any job but they aren’t everything. A great carpenter with great tools will create a great piece of furniture. A great carpenter without great tools will probably still build something amazing. But a good carpenter with great tools can transcend his or her ability in some ways to create something very special. Development platforms are no different. The better your tools are the easier it will be for more people to create great things on top of your platform. The only problem in today’s RIA landscape is that there are really only two companies with great tooling stories. Not coincidentally, they’re also the biggest players: Adobe and Microsoft.

The tooling is also one of the big reasons that the rivalry between Adobe and Microsoft is so interesting. To paint a broad brush, Adobe has great design tools and Microsoft has great developer tools. Adobe has made a lot of inroads with Flex Builder and because we based it on a pretty good existing toolset,we got some instant credibility in the developer space. Microsoft made a big splash when they rolled out their Expression Suite as a competitor to Adobe’s design tools. One of the unique things about rich Internet application platforms is that you need both great design tools as well as great developer tools. That’s one area where smaller companies are going to struggle. Microsoft and Adobe both have the resources and the know how around tools which they can build on as they cross over into each others territory.

So what’s the solution and what’s my prediction? First, I realize I say this with a lot of bias, but that’s not the intent. If I were smaller companies I would build off of the bigger companies tools. I started thinking about this when Coté and I were on the podcast talking about JavaFx possibly hooking into Adobe’s design tools. If other RIA companies can take advantage of the Microsoft/Adobe toolchain, then they don’t have to worry about building from scratch (hard). They can simply plugin to the existing market and focus on the interoperability between those tools and their own platforms. In the Ajax world, which still hasn’t quite nailed the tooling yet, this could be a huge differentiator.

There are still risks. Microsoft and Adobe are obviously looking to make their tools play best with their platforms so being an addon is kind of a tricky situation. But I think the importance that everyone has started to place on experience means that both the design and development tools are going to be a very key part of the story. How those tools evolve, and especially in the realm between designer and developer, will be a important subplot to the adoption of RIAs.

This morning Blist announced that they’ve raised a $6.5 million series A round with Frazier Technology Ventures and Mogenthaler Ventures. Blist made a splash when it launched at Demo as a Database in the Cloud. The company has been doing some really great things with Flex and in conjunction with the funding announcement they’ve added some new functionality including charting and the ability to share Blists.

Big congrats to the team. I’m a huge fan of the application because I think the business model is sound and they focused so heavily on user experience and design. I’m looking forward to see how they put the new money to work. It’s a great example of why RIA technologies can be so helpful.

More Coverage:
Mashable
VentureBeat
Read/WriteWeb
CenterNetworks
bub.blicio.us

Scribd rolled out a new version of their document sharing application with an improved Flash-based interface and the ability to embed Google ads inside of the document. I’m a huge fan of FlashPaper and was really bummed when it was discontinued but was glad to see it get some use in things like Scribd. The new interface is very slick and I like the fact that you can change the view mode depending on your preference.

The biggest news for me was that they’re now supporting Google Ads inside of Flash. As Mike Potter notes this is the first time he’s seen Google Ads embedded inside of their Flash display application. I’ve gotten a ton of questions about advertising in Flash in the past couple of weeks so it’s interesting to see how Scribd did it. Text is obviously a natural medium and having the ability to inspect the document before it becomes Flash makes the task a lot easier.

The competition in the document rendering/sharing space is getting bigger. TechCrunch notes a few of the competitors including Docstoc and edocr and we recently released Adobe Share which also allows you to share and embed documents. Flash is being used for a lot of different things from rich media to rich paper. It’s cool to see nontraditional uses for RIA technologies and I hope the trend continues.

Tonight Bungee Labs is launching a new version of their “platform as a service” offering and it’s pretty impressive. BungeeConnect is an on demand application development platform in which the IDE resides entirely in the browser. You build your applications in the browser and then have the ability to publish what you create and pay for it on a demand basis. The more popular your application, the more you’ll pay. So much like Amazon’s S3 or EC2 you can leverage the Bungee back-end to power your web application.

What’s unique about Bungee is that everything happens inside their environment, hence the term platform as a service. Instead of having to pull development, storage and deployment from various services, everything (plus more) is contained right within Bungee. So you get everything; a development environment, the ability to debug, the ability to test, the mechanisms to publish, and storage capacity that scales as your application requires it.

BungeeConnect has been around a little while and I’ve played with it a bit and was pretty impressed with the IDE. One of the more important aspects of this announcement in my mind is that they’ve created a very powerful calendaring application that brings together services like Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar into one very powerful Ajax application that was built using BungeeConnect. That application is going to be open sourced so that any developer can take a look at how it was built and take ideas/code to use in their own Bungee Connect creations.

I’d love to see Bungee as an AIR application or with any kind of offline support. I think the IDE is very much breaking the barriers of “desktop software versus browser software” and it would be very cool to be able to leverage the Bungee IDE from anywhere and then continue to use the rest of the Bungee infrastructure to test and deploy applications. They’ve built up a very solid offering for everyone from teams to individual developers.

One of my favorite anecdotes was a story about a Bungee employee who got an emergency phone call and had to make changes to the underlying code-base (all built with the Bungee application). He was shopping at Best Buy at the time and was able to go over to a connected computer, log in, and make the required changes then publish them to the production server. That’s one of the powerful things about BungeeConnect: it’s development wherever you need to do it.

More info:
TechCrunch
ReadWriteWeb

Dailymotion announced today that they’re starting to offer some of their content in sweet 720p HD video. As some have noted, it used to be that HD video was something no one really cared about. A lot of people, including YouTube, feel that HD video on the web isn’t going to work and there won’t be demand for it. Luckily companies like Vimeo and Dailymotion are proving that incorrect.

HD quality rich media on the web is a great thing and it’s been one area where the Silverlight/Flash competition has been absolutely fantastic. It’s also a testament to how quickly Adobe can roll out new features in the Flash player and let people take advantage of them. When you be sure that most of the web can view HD content, why not provide it? And that’s the key. If you can lower the barrier to entry on HD rich media content, people will want it. It’s going to become a bigger and bigger differentiator especially as the “couch” and the “computer chair” converge around online video. YouTube isn’t in danger of going away, but I think they’ll face pressure from a lot of sides to implement an HD solution. The sooner the better, especially if they can do it in a way that checks the bandwidth of the user and provides them the best content.

I try not to post every one of the RIA Weekly because I figure most people who want to listen will have subscribed to to the feed but this episode was one of my favorites so I wanted to mention it. We sat down with Bill Higgins from the Jazz project and covered a lot of stuff. We talked about his work on the Jazz project which is interesting because it’s a hybrid application with a web-based front end, Jazz, in Ajax and a rich client version built on Eclipse. We also got into a pretty good discussion of user interfaces for rich Internet applications. I think I learned more in this episode than any of the other ones.

Congratulations to S. Somasegar and Scott Guthrie, two of the people who are most visible in Microsoft’s developer division and have been in a lot of ways leading the Silverlight/WPF initiatives at Microsoft. According to Mary Jo Foley both of them got new titles/promotions as part (or before) the announced reorganization. From my vantage point both of these guys have been doing a very good job and I think this is an indication that the rich Internet application platforms continue to be a big part of Microsoft’s future.

Now is probably a good time to reflect on what Microsoft embracing experience has meant for everyone. There’s a lot of digital ink wasted on the competitive landscape between Adobe and Microsoft. Undoubtedly there are some big implications here and in some ways it’s a very, very competitive time. But over the past year and a half rich Internet applications have taken absolutely huge leaps in both functionality and style. A number of 3rd party vendors have jumped into the space like Curl and Appcelerator. There’s a lot of innovation from every angle and ultimately, I think customers are really starting to see the fruits of competition.

I’m really excited to see our internal pace at Adobe. We’re pushing our platform in a number of different ways and we’re continually innovating on tools and services like Buzzword. That’s in no small part to the surge in interest and excitement in rich Internet applications. I’ll also be at MIX early next month and I’m looking forward to see some of the things Scott and Soma have been doing to get promotions. RIAs are here to stay and it’s only going to get better.

Matt Asay loves the new Zimbra Desktop client. They’re using Prism as the desktop client, the project from Mozilla labs that came out of Mozilla’s WebRunner. It’s great to see people like Matt get the need for desktop applications. More and more I think people are realizing that they just want to have access to their data wherever they are. Sometimes that means checking email from a web browser in best buy, sometimes it means having it on your phone, but sometimes you know you’ll be spending a lot of time inside of the email client and you want to have a separate desktop client for it.

And there are a ton of reasons. The browser is the swiss-army knife of applications and if you’re a multi-tasker like so many people on the web, you’ll be doing email, checking news, looking up information, so if it’s easy, why not create an email client that runs in a different memory space and has a bit richer experience. The key is making it easy, which is what Prism and AIR both do. It’s just web technologies on the desktop so you can quickly and easily port those browser-based applications that you may spend a lot of time in to the desktop.

Matt does a good job of showing why a desktop experience is still a great one. If we can combine the web and the desktop then I think it’s win-win for everyone.

I haven’t been able to review a lot of WPF applications which is why I’m always thrilled when one comes my way. The latest I’ve been testing out the past couple of days is ViewOn.tv a general purpose media player that has a lot of the features you’d expect wrapped up in WPF. It actually made me remember how much I love WPF applications. It has some performance issues for me on my machine but there’s something about the WPF component set and user interfaces people build that really stand out to me.

ViewOn.tv lets you do everything you’d expect, you can import your music library and also play radio stations from the application. I couldn’t find where to have it go out and grab the album art for me, but other than that the process was straightforward. It’s got a mini mode and a cool pop-out interface when browsing the album art. The player also supports burning your playlists to a CD. In addition, you can play music directly from your devices. They say they support the iPod but I couldn’t get my Zune to show up on the device menu. The interface is cleanly striking. It’s basically a grayscale color theme with a single regular color that the user can chose to complete the theme. It ends up being a nice effect.

The ViewOn.tv player launched earlier this year so the version they have is still very, very early. Right now there isn’t a ton to differentiate it from other media players but as I said above, there’s something about the interface that I really like so I have high hopes for the application.

Discovery Channel launched a cool rich Internet application today, Earth Live, that lets you view the earth with overlays of information like weather or environmental data. The center of the application is a 3D earth which you can interact with and spin around. Then you can use the tabs in the lower right hand corner to add layers of information to the globe. There’s a ton of data there in two formats; pre created stories and all the data they have available. The pre created layers/stories are things like the recent tornadoes or the state of the Biosphere. The regular layers are where things get really fun. They’ve got cloud data, rainfall, sea surface temperature, nitrogen dioxide and others so that you can layer these on top of one another and look for correlations in a very interactive and visible way. The picture below is looking at the rainfall and cloud cover in Seattle…..surprise, surprise.

Discovery Channel used EffectiveUI to work on the application so it has a lot of polish and is a well designed user interface. In talking to Anthony Franco, the founder and CEO of EffectiveUI, he said he wanted to do a content first approach so the earth is at the center of the application and everything else radiates from that. Another cool feature is the ability for Discovery Channel to mark items on the globe. Using a feed of stories with longitude and latitude coordinates you can see on your map things like what’s happening with the Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf Expedition. The story links back to the blog so the RIA does a great job of helping users get deeper into the site.

As with anything nowadays, they have a Facebook application so you can take your creations with you and embed them on your Facebook page. You can also take any of your custom layer arrangements and share them on a blog. This application is a lot of fun to play around with and the it’s a great way to provide a wealth of data. From a technical standpoint the EffectiveUI team said that what they’re doing is overlaying video on top of the 3D globe. While I’m a fan of 3D interfaces I haven’t seen a ton of great use cases yet. This one is one of them.