[Sigia-l] The IA in RIAs

[Listera]

Dave:

A few narrow, technical corrections:

> What HTML can't do is then hold the total set in a client resident database
> that can then be accessed, manipulated, and updated with a broader set of
> intelligences that in HTML requires yet another get from the server.

There's nothing in HTML that makes this inherently impossible, though
certainly it's not the norm yet. Data/transaction can be defined by a
RESTful link. Where that link resides is largely a matter of choice. In a
broadband world (in the U.S. there is now more residential broadband access
than dial-up finally), it matters little where the data is actually stored,
for the vast majority of online apps. Whether data in use is cached
(locally) or not is a more important factor (for things like fast table
sorting). 

Flash apps (which are presumably considered RIAs) don't have a local
persistence layer, in the way we think of databases. There's no
straightforward embeddable/embedded DB in Flash. Data gets in/out of a Flash
app locally by parsing variable/XML streams. MM Central, on the other hand,
does bring to Flash the notion of a local/remote data persistence mix.
(This, BTW, is further complicated by the Macromedia security policy of
requiring access stubs to be placed at targeted servers.)

> This has two positive effects. The user effect of speed but the other effect
> of limiting bandwidth and CPU use.

For the vast majority of online apps, especially going forward, bandwidth
and CPU are not really the bottlenecks, in a broadband world.

In the upcoming Flash 8, for example, vector definitions for movies and
components are bitmap cached for pixel shuffling, therefore extremely fast
and with great reduction in CPU cycles. The bottleneck shifts (in addition
to database access) to XML parsing, serializing and binding data to objects,
etc. The latter are handled by the runtime engine (Flash player) regardless
of whether the data resides locally or remotely.

I'd also like to remind people once again that the speed with which Google
handles data refreshes in GMail and Google Suggest should put to rest the
notion that HTML or remote data is always slow. Those are way faster than
most Flash/RIAs out there.

Designers solve problems. Other than being knowledgeable about design
constraints thus introduced, we shouldn't really care where an app's data
resides.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba