Moving to RIAs: What to Expect, How to Proceed

Featuring: John Tibbetts, Senior Consultant, Cutter Enterprise Architecture practice

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are quickly moving beyond commercial web sites into core enterprise applications. Chances are you have already heard about how these dynamic web interfaces can improve the user experience, boost productivity, and take full advantage of SOA.

But there is more to RIA adoption than you will hear from vendors. Get the full story in this 60-minute webinar with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant John Tibbetts. A veteran of several RIA-based projects, John looks at this user-interface revolution from the enterprise's point of view, with special emphasis on application selection, development-team organization, and overall architecture. "Adding a RIA changes the back-end as much as the front-end," Tibbetts says. "Once you understand that, the opportunity is tremendous."

This webinar looks at the three stages of RIA adoption:

• Evaluating (objectively) the commercial frameworks available for RIA development. How to find the approach that suits your organization’s culture, structure, and goals.
• Thinking about enterprise applications in the RIA era. Determining which existing inquiry/update apps could benefit from a RIA look and feel, and identifying enterprise tasks that can now be expedited with "dashboards" that provide real-time information or with "mashups" that integrate tools and views from multiple sources. Also, advice on choosing first-generation projects that will both provide solid development experience and show off RIA capabilities to best advantage.
• Understanding the architectural implications. RIAs will have a more profound impact than you may expect, and will affect your application back-ends at least as much as your front-ends. If you are prepared for the fundamental redistribution of functionality that RIAs bring, you can end up with improved reuse, a more efficient development process, and a cleaner overall architecture.

Whether this webinar is your first exposure to practical RIA issues or whether you’ve dog-eared John Tibbetts's Cutter Consortium Enterprise Architecture Executive Report RIAs: UIs, Platforms, and Architecture, this presentation and the 20-minute Q&A will provide objective, experience-based insight.

Get Answers to Your Specific Questions

The last 20 minutes of this webinar are devoted to a live Question and Answer session: Get your questions answered by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant John Tibbetts.