With Internet expansion as a medium, a growing demand for richer, more user engaging content and better overall user interface experience, laid the ground for more powerful frameworks to emerge for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA), interactive applications that bring real life animated content in a very responsive (almost real time) manner.

Although many technologies (Adobe Flex, OpenLaszlo, Microsoft Silverlight, AJAX) can be used for building RIA, it is clear that Flash video format became the standard for video on the web and with 98% acceptance of its Flash Player gives Adobe (Flex) advantage among its competitors.

Internet browser with all of its inconsistencies and limitations clearly had a different purpose at the time of its creation. After Flex went open source I slowly started to shift from design to development world. Adobe’s Flex is arguably the most important new Internet development tool for building Rich Internet Applications or applications that run in the traditional browser but utilizes an intermediate layer that can bypass the traditional page refresh that has been a standard of most current Web applications.

Kevin Lynch (former Macromedia CTO and current Chief Software Architect at Adobe) in his interview at Flashforward shares his excitement on Flash and the way developers are delivering technologies, naming some of his favorite application examples like picnik, buzzword …

So in conclusion Rich Internet Applications are the future of the internet because:

1. they offer richer interface (www.scion.com) that provides a more engaging user experience without the need for page reloads.
2. they offer real-time feedback and validation to the user, triggered by user events.
3. they have look and feel of a traditional desktop application (fidelity labs)
4. they include a full multimedia experience, including audio and video (fordvehicles.com/flex/)
5. have capabilities such as real-time chat and collaboration that are either very difficult or simply impossible with traditional Web applications