A million dollar question: which RIA technology do we recommend?

It could be at the end of one of our presentations at a conference, or in the middle of an RFP from a prospect or at the beginning of an email from an analyst, but the question is always the same: “Which RIA technology do we recommend?”.

Don’t worry we have an answer, actually a million dollar answer.

This reminds me of course of a similar question that the same people asked 10 years ago: “Should I use Java or Microsoft technology?”. And of course every developer, architect, project manager, CIO had the right answer and could probably list 5 reasons why Java or MS was better than the other. Of course there were also a few souls that would evangelize the idea of building their enterprise on PERL but we haven’t heard from them in a while.

So the RIA question came up this past week again and a few brave souls at Molecular decided to put ink on paper and let the riot begin. Here is a summary of what they had to say [barely edited]:

• Flash/Flex tends to run more consistently when your users are on multiple platforms
• Flash is superior for smooth animations and transitions that involve more than just a few elements on the screen
• With Flash you get a lot more freedom to use odd shapes as clickable/interactive objects. Need an amoeba shaped button that is not clickable outside the confines of the general rectangle? You’re going to need flash for that one…
• Flash can be annoying for managing text, since its fixed-size elements often force designers to create scrolling regions of text within pages where normally the region would simply expand to accommodate however much text there is. Not sure if that made sense, but it drives me crazy.
• You may wish to use Flash to _present_ navigation links, but do not use it to IMPLEMENT navigation – you are opening the door to SEO hell / dual-site maintenance.
• AJAX is best suited for applications where page content needs to be updated dynamically with simple animations
• Do NOT use flash to handle things that can be done perfectly well with traditional technologies – such as the footer links. I don’t care what they say about font kerning, it’s all BS that you will pay for with cost and time overruns.
• Flash/Flex are the sole choice in situations involving multimedia, video and audio
• in reply to the one above: Absolutely not. See: the site we just launched for E&Y or the new YouTube API. You most certainly can do solid video integration with a simple embedded player (if they’re using FLV, like they should) that exposes methods with ExternalInterface. That goes both ways: your player can trigger JavaScript and vice versa.
• if you want to have a page be updatable by a server without user interaction (remember “push” technology?), you may want to use flash for this
• in reply to the one above: This is possible without flash by using a technology stack many call Comet (just another soap brand, eh? :). Meebo and Mibbit (not related, surprisingly) have excellent implementations of this. Though– I’ll concede that it’s likely much easier to develop in Flash.
• Running multivariate testing could be easier with ajax, unless you were testing swf vs swf.
• Web analytics seems to be generally equal, flash apps typically reach out using ExternalInterface.

One more that I’d like to add:

• 3D animations: Flash Papervisio3D

Finally, as consultants we don’t always get to make the right final decision, sometimes we are handed the technology and we are told: go build it. It may not always be our preferred choice, but …we’ll try.

Disclaimers:

• I used the word Ajax loosely, in certain cases I should have said dhtml, but you get the point
• We didn’t consider other RIA technologies like Java applets (!), laszlo, you-name-it, because that’s not what we use, but if you do, let us know