While few would question the benefits that Internet-based applications have brought to businesses and consumers alike, the actual experience of interacting with many web-based applications leaves much to be desired, especially when compared with the richness and usability of the best desktop applications. For consumer-oriented applications, such as e-commerce, the web’s page-based model and lack of client-side intelligence can make even relatively simple transactions confusing and error prone. As a result, online businesses are losing millions of dollars to abandoned shopping carts or costly customer service calls. For business applications, the problem is particularly acute. While the web deployment model has allowed IT organizations to reduce the cost of software deployment, it has also created a community of underserved business users that long for a return to the usability and responsiveness of desktop and client/server applications. As a result, businesses are losing millions of dollars per year due to low productivity or poor decisions. Fortunately, after long focusing on the technical challenges of web-enabling their application infrastructure, forward-looking IT professionals are now turning their attention to design patterns and technologies that can improve the client side of the equation. As a result, we are now seeing widespread deployment of rich Internet applications (RIAs), a new class of applications that combines the responsiveness and interactivity of desktop applications with the broad reach and ease of distribution of the web. RIAs can drive increased return on investment (ROI) by simplifying and improving the user interaction—enabling users to find information more easily, complete tasks quickly and accurately, and use rich data visualization to make better decisions. Before realizing these benefits, however, IT professionals must navigate through a new set of technologies as well as understand the architectural and developer skill requirements implied by the move toward RIA-style applications. This technical white paper discusses both the short-term and long-term requirements of RIAs and discusses how the Adobe Flex 2 product family helps IT organizations take advantage of existing skills and infrastructure to efficiently deliver a broad range of RIAs that can scale from simple marketing applications to mission-critical enterprise applications…

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