State-of-the Art and trends in the Systematic Development of Rich Internet Applications

  • Authors:
  • Giovanni Toffetti;Sara Comai;Juan Carlos Preciado;Marino Linaje

  • Affiliations:
  • Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Lugano, Switzerland;Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy;Quercus Software Engineering Group, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain;Quercus Software Engineering Group, Universidad de Extremadura, Cáceres, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Web Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are widely adopted Web applications that add the richer interaction,presentation, and client-side computation capabilities of desktop applications to the Web. However, the evolutionfrom Web applications towards RIAs comes at the cost of increased complexity in their development. For thisreason, a wide variety of tools and technologies have been proposed in order to streamline their developmenteffort. This paper investigates the current state of the art of the RIA development approaches. The review showsthat the current industrial development practice lacks a comprehensive approach to RIA development, supportingall the development steps from the design to implementation, test and maintenance, and helping identifying correctdesign choices. This is in part due to the severe fragmentation of current RIA technologies that prevents theadoption of a commonly recognized set of best practices resulting in ad-hoc development processes. These aspectsare in part treated by research methodologies and some innovative industrial solutions, but also these approachespresent some limitations. The paper identifies future research directions for RIAs to fully support theirdevelopment process and to support their design in a more comprehensive and systematic way, from bothindustrial and research perspectives.