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Faced by the uphill struggle of justifying SOA to business managers who find the benefits of SOA hard to understand let alone quantify, it is tempting to link it to other areas of technology innovation which are (we hope) easier to justify. I have previously blogged about the attractiveness of the enterprise mash-up and impact on the infrastructure associated any wide-scale adoption of such mash-ups.

The announcement from Abode about the latest version of its RIA platform reminded me that the issues are not only associated with the ‘back-end’. In particular, the RIA space is developing fast but is still immature. The world has certainly moved well beyond the appearance of Google maps and AJAX. (Of course, AJAX was always a confusing term in that it gave the impression to outsiders that there was a well-defined piece of software rather than a general approach to creating RIA.) However, the RIA space remains an incredibly busy space as can be seen from the list of 25 different RIA frameworks listed here . This diversity reflects a great level of innovation which is good in the long term. And it is fair to point out that RIA is a wide definition – some of the 25 are focused on specific types of applications such as the Ruby on Rails for developing database backed web applications while others such as Tibco’s General Interface are clearly intended for use with enterprise middleware at the back.

This poses the challenge for the enterprise architect of which horse or horses to back. The easy answer that I have heard is that it doesn’t matter: RIA is supposedly easy to replace and are often used to create opportunistic applications (quick to create with short life-spans). If you change your mind (the story goes), simply rip and replace with another RIA. Equally, (the story continues) it doesn’t matter if one department goes for one RIA and another a second.

I remain unconvinced. Yes it is true that it is easier to replace an RIA than to replace infrastructure software such as message queues. To stretch an analogy, if switching message queuing is like a lung transplant, then switching RIA might be grafting back a finger – while I definitely wouldn’t like the first, I wouldn’t volunteer for the second either. What is being ignored is the cost of replacing or maintaining in parallel RIAs based on old tool-kits and new. What is also being ignored is that the users of these applications are the sensitive business users who will not appreciate the disruption of their favorite tool which follows on from switches in strategy.

All of which means that we need to look at the RIA options with a great deal of care: The opportunities and benefits are certainly considerable. However as with other bets on early markets, there are significant downsides as we inevitably make the wrong choices from time to time.

Ronan

Posted by rbradley in Mash ups • Product news • SOA Predictions • SOA concepts • Web2.0 |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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