Dynamic Web Interfaces in 5 Days: Getting the Most Out of RIAs

Presenter: John Tibbetts

Bringing Rich Internet Application (RIA) technology into your organization could be your most significant step toward improving productivity, streamlining your development process, and taking best advantage of SOA.

This is too important a move to entrust to vendor assurances!

Get an objective, practical, hands-on RIA experience with Cutter's Dynamic Web Interfaces QuickStart. Over the course of a week, an architect/implementer will show you how to proceed, what to expect, and how to leverage the changes that RIA technology will bring to your overall application architecture.

John Tibbetts, who has written extensively about RIAs for Cutter Consortium, will lead your team in:

  • Discussing UI principles
  • Situating them within end-to-end application design
  • Evaluating RIA-building products
  • Assessing your organization's RIA-adoption tasks
  • Working with RIAs by adapting a pre-built template to perform one of your mission-critical tasks
  • Developing an action plan for the future

RIAs are the face of Web 2.0. These are the responsive, customizable, composite applications pioneered by commercial web sites and now adopted by the enterprise. RIA-enabled applications can integrate information from a variety of sources in a single view. They replace the page-at-a-time metaphor with a collage of morphable views, tools, and real-time data feeds. They offer the experience of interacting directly with the application -- a "live" look-and-feel that users appreciate. They are the ideal front-end for the SOA-enabled applications that will dominate the coming decade.

What Can RIAs Give the Enterprise?

You may already be familiar with the many benefits of RIAs, including

  • A more responsive, "live" user experience
  • Improved productivity thanks to customizable views and toolsets
  • Dashboards providing real-time views into the organization
  • Potential for including instructional videos, explanatory animations, maps, chat, etc.
  • SOA-ready user interfaces.

But there is a great deal more to the story:

  • UI development standardized and simplified
  • Back-end application untangled as UI functionality migrates to the client
  • Application architecture extended into the previously free-form front end
  • Improved reuse of both objects and principles
  • Streamlined development end to end

Why not makes RIAs work for your organization as hard as they can?

How Cutter's Dynamic Web Interfaces QuickStart Gets You There

This weeklong program provides a roadmap for your organization's RIA endeavor. Whether you have just begun considering RIAs or are well along the adoption path, you will get valuable practical help and a conceptual framework for maximizing RIA benefits throughout your application architecture.

We will survey the latest generation of RIA-building frameworks to determine which best suits your organization's application needs and developer skillsets. We will talk about application design in the RIA age -- what kinds of existing apps could benefit from the addition of a RIA front end, what new kinds of apps now become feasible. With your organization's priorities in mind, we will choose among three pre-built RIA frameworks -- an enhanced query/update transactional app, a "dashboard" featuring real-time data feeds, and a "mashup" that combines tools and views from multiple sources -- and adapt it to one of your actual enterprise tasks.

Going beyond other RIA training, this QuickStart will also emphasize RIA's effect on application back-ends. It is crucial to understand that RIAs are not just a front-end phenomenon, but that they reallocate functionality in a way that affects the entire application. You will see how, used properly, RIAs can clean up your entire application architecture and expedite development end to end.

QuickStart Agenda

1. Executive briefing
  • What an RIA looks and feels like: a guided tour of selected Web sites
  • Brief history of user interface evolution
  • Discussion of enterprise efficiency improved by RIAs
  • Potential impact on enterprise architecture and development team organization
2. Readiness assessment
  • Review of your current UI technologies and practices
  • Evaluation of your current and future application needs for their RIA potential
  • Examination of your existing back-end technologies with an eye toward RIA connectivity
3. Evaluating RIA development platforms
  • Moving beyond Ajax
  • Major candidates from Adobe, Microsoft, Google, and others: strengths and weaknesses
  • Choosing the approach that best suits your organization's needs, culture, and technology base
4. QuickStart pilot implementation
  • Choose an application to RIA-ify
  • Map it against one of our pre-built RIA templates (call center, dashboard, or mashup)
  • Adapt the template to yield a rough RIA-enabled version of the selected app
  • Validate the resulting user experience
  • Estimate the gap between this quick pilot, a true pilot, and a production-level app
5. Action plan for the future
  • Settling on a development platform
  • Steps to organizational and architectural readiness (people, skills, principles)
  • Preparing to add RIA elements to existing UIs
  • Preparing for optimized interfaces for scalable, performant RIAs
  • Structuring and assembling the RIA team
  • Estimating end-user involvement in conceptualizing, planning, testing

RIA Templates for a Running Start

When a team builds its first application in a new language, it's quicker and easier to modify an existing application than to create a new one from scratch. So we've created three adaptable RIA applications complete with working front-end code (written in either Java/ Google Web Toolkit or in Adobe Flex). These applications represent three common RIA scenarios:

  • Call Center supports look-up and modification of customer data;
  • Dashboard demonstrates real-time status display (both tabular and graphical) of business process data;
  • Mashup displays service call assignments and updates of a Google Map

Each of these applications supports a working back-end process implemented as a Java servlet and deployed on a servlet container in the class site.

We will review one of these templates (or more, as your needs and available time dictate), walk through the RIA idioms under the hood, and then modify the template to make it conform to your own vocabulary and business processes. The source code for client and server will be left with you to serve as exemplary code or even as a basis for your first working RIA application.

Get Started Right Away

For more information, or to schedule a QuickStart for your organization, contact your Cutter Consortium account executive directly, or call us at +1 781 648 8700 or send e-mail to sales@cutter.com.

About John Tibbetts
About Cutter Consortium



Consulting, training, coaching and mentoring service span all of Cutter's practice areas, plus additional areas of expertise.

For more information on customizing a consulting engagement for your organization, contact Jack Wainwright, +1 781-641-5122 or jwainwright@cutter.com.


Quote Rich Internet applications (RIAs) will certainly be the next decade’s powerhouse, and enterprises that want a powerful Web presence should be taking steps toward adopting this new technology. Quote
-- John Tibbetts


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Dynamic Web Interfaces in 5 Days: Getting the Most Out of RIAs