Hello,
I'm building a web app and starting to feel the pain developing slick UI features -- I tried iPhone/Android programming and it's so damn simple. Why is it that everyone still settles for the hacked-together tools that comprise web programming, instead of gravitating towards RIAs?
I want to program the app with an RIA but...the most popular websites are suspiciously not using them.
Thanks!
There's a couple of drawbacks to RIA... I'm mostly speaking to Flash/Silverlight and the like, as Ajax RIA is a bit different. The drawbacks:
Vendor lockin... once you develop a platform using RIA you are locked into whichever vendor supports the RIA. You are at the mercy of their support, upgrade paths, etc. Using standard web technologies you won't fall into this.
Search engine indexing... Search indexing of RIA is relatively new, so there might be issues getting your content known.
Performance/interoperability issues... Everyone knows about Apple's rejection of Flash. Writing your web application adhering to the standards guarantees your application is accessible to any standards compliant browser. A company like Apple can't just pull the plug on you.
Accessibility issues... It might not be as easy to program for 508 compliance using Flash/Silverlight as it would be with plain-old HTML. 508 compliance is a must for any big website.
You mentioned phones... (Android/iOS) Obviously people don't target mobile phones using Flash/Silverlight for the aforementioned reasons. For phones, generally it makes more sense to create a mobile application as you get more native features then you would if you were creating a mobile website. However, creating a mobile website requires you to write your application once whereas you would need to write your application for each phone you wish to target if you went the mobile application route.
Flex feels slow and non-native.
RIAs running on the desktop generally have to feel native on at least two very different operating systems. You then have to deal with issues on the users machine and the whole nightmare of versioning and upgrades. Web apps only have to work on your server configuration.
RIAs running in the browser feel even slower because all that slickness has to be transferred to the client. They also break the way people expect websites to work.
They are useful for some applications, but normal HTML/JS/AJAX serves most web applications better.
Phones are a different environment entirely and make more sense for the RIA model in many ways.