HTML5 and future of RIA

Few years back when Macromedia (now Adobe ) coined the term RIA (Rich Internet Application), there were very few players in the industry who visualized that desktop paradigm could be moved to web platform. As a pioneer of the RIA movement, Adobe created the right awareness and tools around it. Microsoft and Sun followed this path and created their own tools to grab the RIA market share (Silverlight/JavaFx)

In the coming days, with increased adoption of cloud based solutions, this momentum of RIA is only going to increase further. The only visible change in the horizon is that proprietary tools and technologies going to be replaced by open technologies. This is because industry always on the lookout for cost effective and cross platform solution. When there is an open source and large adopted solution around, why to settle down for a proprietary one?

To be more specific, It's going to be HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3. We have already witnessed strong endorsement from leaders like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft to name a few. It also obvious from Adobe's recent initiative towards html5 related tools (Adobe Wallaby pre-release) that they understand the change . It is just that they can not endorse HTML5 openly against Flash. I anticipate that in the near future Flash Builder will have the option of exporting to HTML5.

There are number of features HTML5 has introduced which could be leveraged to develop more responsive RIA solutions. Leading browsers have already started supporting these features.

You may argue that the newly introduced tags/features are good for developing small websites with few screens but what about Enterprise RIAs? Are we ready yet? Is there any good MVC framework around for HTML5?

These questions are being asked by many developers like me who have become too comfortable in the proprietary tools and technologies. With the disruptive technologies on the forefront, it’s time to come out from our comfort zone and explore.