Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

In March 2007, Forrester Research published "The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications," a report based on interviews with RIA technology providers and designers, as well as Forrester Research clients and customers. The report revealed that "well designed RIAs can produce eye‐popping results that can help prove the value of current investments and make the case for future RIA projects."
In today's global business environment, where customers are more demanding than ever and brand loyalty is increasingly difficult to obtain, deeper customer engagement is integral to an organization's success. RIAs can make customer interactions compelling, dynamic, and useful — in a word, engaging.s
RIA technologies provide the tools, frameworks, servers, services, and clients required to create successful RIAs. Using these technologies, designers and developers can work efficiently together to push the boundaries of what is possible in the browser and on the desktop today.
Rich Internet Applications are thought of as applications that have the visual characteristics of desktop applications but are delivered to users over the Internet using standard Internet clients such as web browsers.
RIAs offer significant advantage over traditional web applications in a number of areas, some of which I have mentioned below.

Better responsiveness

In traditional web applications user actions translate into page refreshes. Sometimes, when users perform an action that should affect only part of what is displayed on a screen, a full page refresh causes delays in response and a poor user experience. RIAs only load data relevant to a user’s action and then refresh only parts of the screen that are affected by that data. This produces much higher levels of responsiveness and increases user productivity and engagement by allowing them to focus on specific tasks and being able to achieve those tasks quickly.

Enriched user experience

RIAs usually have much better graphical capabilities over HTML based applications. In addition, most RIAs can interact with common peripheral devices on computers like speakers, graphics cards, web cameras and styluses to provide customers a much higher level of interaction with their computer. Increased capabilities of RIAs allow user interactions such as virtual meetings, online brainstorming, collaborative designs and voice chat possible over the Internet. Better graphics enable applications to take advantage of features such as complex graphs and animations.

Inter‐connectivity and re‐use

RIAs allow developers to glue together external applications into their applications to provide functionality that is served from other applications but appears as a natural extension to the containing application. This concept is usually referred to as Web Mashups. Google Maps is an application that features in many popular mashups. Applications like Facebook and LinkedIn make heavy use of mashups.