User>Driven

There’s a battle for the handset being waged now among RIA development environments. I predict the winner of this battle will win on the desktop as well. Java on the handset has a commanding lead today, according to David Berlind of ZDNet, but it faces new and formidable foes in Adobe Apollo and Microsoft Silverlight.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide a more interactive, responsive and desktop-like user experience compared with traditional browser-based apps using html or even the new crop of javascript-driven Ajax applications like Gmail. Flash apps, for example, can run inside or outside of the browser, can quickly exchange data with the server without requiring a page load, and can support complex interactive forms (read commerce) and animations (read games).

A key advantage of RIA development environments like Apollo, though, is that they wrap Flash apps (and Ajax and other existing application types) in a layer that allows them to operate without a connection to the network and then allows them to sync up with the server when the network is available. This is critical for mobile apps where your signal may not always be available (like on parts of my commute home by train). Imagine trying to make a purchase or play a multi-player strategy game when your connection kicks out. Did your credit card number or your latest brilliant move go through?

I contend this ability to keep working when disconnected is also critical for desktop apps and that dominance in mobile app development tools will lead to dominance on the desktop as well. PCs are now mobile devices, too. Everywhere you go on trains and planes and in the backseats of cabs you see people on their laptops typing away. Laptop prices have come down so much, people just aren’t buying stationary desktops anymore. I personally think of my daily train ride as part of my work day. The only trouble is, most of us are stuck working on our laptops disconnected.

Worse, desktop apps that make no use of the Internet are quickly becoming a minority as Microsoft rolls out Office Live, Google apps gains traction, and people switch in droves to web-based email apps. A perfect example is Quicken – one of the most popular apps on the planet – which began as an offline checkbook balancing and check-printing utility and now downloads balances from your bank and credit cards and pays bills electronically.

Mobile app development is all the rage, but frankly, my laptop spends less time connected than my Crackberry every day and I use it more for the kinds of things RIAs are good at. Moreover, RIAs are often self-downloading and self-updating like traditional webapps, making them much easier for Joe consumer (or Joe IT guy) to install and manage than traditional shrink-wrapped software. All of the advantages RIAs bring to phones play as well or even better on laptops, in my opinion.

So once one or more of these RIAs becomes fruitful and multiplies on mobile devices, enabling more fun, more interactivity and more commerce in that realm, I predict we will see them more and more on these other, lager mobile devices people use every day. The decision to use your laptop vs. your mobile will become less about the availability of a network signal than about whether you are standing or sitting and how much keyboard and screen real estate you need for a task.

The kicker for application providers, though, will be when they realize that not only can they leverage the skills their people learned for mobile device development on desktops, but that there is a demand for access to the same app on both platforms. Gmail is already on the web and on my Crackberry, for example, as is my access to Exchange email. How about letting me pay my bills on my mobile, Intuit? And can I have it in a familiar interface like Quicken?

My dream is that using the same development environment on multiple platforms will make seamless the use of these apps across those platforms. Compare this with the cranky, hard to maintain and hard to use integration between Exchange, Blackberry Enterprise Server and the four different clients I have to use to access content from the Exchange server. (Yes, four: 1 is Outlook 2003 on my laptop, 2 is Blackberry’s email client, 3 is Outlook webmail via IE – which is relatively full-featured - when I am using a PC other than my laptop, 4 is Outlook webmail via Safari or Firefox on my iMac – which is not very full-featured.)

Where can we see the beginnings of this trend? Check out Allurent. (Full disclosure: Allurent is a partner of my employer, ATG.) Their Flash-based eCommerce UIs “deliver rich interactions throughout the shopping lifecycle, from browsing to choosing to buying.” Imagine if you could shop your favorite online clothing store and use a rich UI that let you zoom in on individual items, look at close ups of fabric swatches, watch videos of models wearing the clothes, browse outfit configurators, and place your final order – all on your cell phone or laptop on your way home on the train or in your carpool.

I give the industry 12-18 months to start offering rich internet UIs for games and eCommerce sites that can operate with intermittent connections to the net. Virtual Ubiquity has announced their intention to release an Apollo-based word processor that can work online and off. Anyone know of examples out there already?