Introduction to Rich Internet Apps on the IBM i

Hi, I'm Alex Whitman. In this video I will introduce you to Rich Internet Applications, a concept that is taking the world of web development by storm. It is especially relevant when developing web applications on the I. Rich Internet Applications or RIAs are becoming so widespread that the leading research companies such as Gartner and Forester are predicting that more than half of all new development will be done this way in about a year or so and enterprises will be spending billions of dollars annually on RIA technologies.

If you haven’t heard of the term RIA, you may have heard it by other names such as Web 2.0 or Ajax Development or Developing with Java Script frameworks. Regardless of what you call it, this type of web development is becoming very prevalent, so let’s get started.

First let’s try to define Rich Internet Applications, and one way to define them is to compare them to desktop applications. So you kind of get the best of both worlds—the web applications and they are 100% delivered through he browser because you don’t need any special software installed on the desktop or any browser plug-ins but they have all the rich features and functions of traditional desktop applications. So these applications are doing things that are more sophisticated than basic HTML was made for. They may have features such as drag and drop for example and they have pull-down menus, tab menus. They can have data base driven auto complete boxes. They can have grids that are intelligent that allow for things like on-the fly sorting or in-line updating of data. And really anything that you can imagine as far as the interface is concern.

It may sound really sophisticated and complicated, but that’s where RIA Libraries come in, sometimes referred to as Java Script Frameworks. They do most of the work for you by giving simple commands for building tabs, auto-complete boxes, grids, menus, and other user interface on that’s in the browser. There are a number of libraries available. Some such as ExtJS, Yahoo UI (YUI), Dojo and jQuery are often the source. Often using these frameworks you can accomplish more functionality with less coding compared to traditional HTML-based applications.

There are also frameworks that go as far as allowing you to build Rich browser UIs without coding one single line of code. You simply drag the components around the browser screen modifying their properties on the fly. This provides a completely codeless yet very robust environment for building your user interface. Typically, these environments provide simple integration capability of databases such as DB2 on IBMi, I Series. These types of capabilities can be especially useful in modernizing legacy applications.

I hope you enjoyed this short introduction to Rich Internet Applications. As always, feel free to post any comments or questions here at www.profoundlogic.tv and be sure to watch out for follow out videos on RIAs and other topics relating to modernizing Legacy Systems in building modern web applications on the IBM platform.


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