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

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 evolution from Web applications towards RIAs comes at the cost of increased complexity in their development. For this reason, a wide variety of tools and technologies have been proposed in order to streamline their development effort. This paper investigates the current state of the art of the RIA development approaches. The review shows that the current industrial development practice lacks a comprehensive approach to RIA development, supporting all the development steps from the design to implementation, test and maintenance, and helping identifying correct design choices. This is in part due to the severe fragmentation of current RIA technologies that prevents the adoption of a commonly recognized set of best practices resulting in ad-hoc development processes. These aspects are in part treated by research methodologies and some innovative industrial solutions, but also these approaches present some limitations. The paper identifies future research directions for RIAs to fully support their development process and to support their design in a more comprehensive and systematic way, from both industrial and research perspectives.