Mark Spenser - My Blog

The world of Internet Applications has got a new kid in the town named "RIA." That stands for Rich Internet Applications. RIAs are browser-based applications that attain the experience of desktop applications with little server-side interaction. With the limitations of browser-based applications a thing of past tense, you can now expect to see some refreshing RIAs not only on websites but also other digital devices such as phones, cameras, and televisions.

Traditional web applications vs. RIAs

Traditional web applications, built on a client/server architecture, had all the heavy lifting done on the server side, browser was rendered only the static data. The obvious limitations of this architecture were mainly concerned with performance, browser screen delay in particular, where there was a waiting for the browser to refresh and draw a page with passing information to and fro between the server and client-side browser.

With the introduction of RIAs, we get a client-side engine where execution is performed locally without a need for software installation or updates. Thus, pages don’t require to refresh as data transfer to and fro the server is not needed. RIA’s own framework within the browser environment has opened the door for client-side application features that were not previously available.

The market of RIAs is flourishing now for about half a decade as many big-time players have jumped into it, including but not limited to Microsoft SilverLight, Adobe Flex & AIR, AJAX, OpenLazlo Framework, and Google Web Toolkit.

How RIAs make sense to you?

RIAs are cool! Their advent is a major technological breakthrough. You, more importantly your customers, are missing out one of the newest and richest media experiences if you don't have it.

Not limited by the browser language, HTML applications of RIA are faster and richer. RIA incorporated websites are enabled to mix dynamically sourced data, audio, video, and other imageries. As rich a user interface that it has, think of it like Flash on steroids with exemplary dynamic data presentation based on user interactivity with any operating system and not needing a plug-in.

And guess what more! For this, you get most of the developer tools and platforms delivered open source.

Challenges!

Native RIA incapabilities lie in its offline presentation ability and with web analytics adequately addressing the unique features of RIAs.

With that said, if heavy-hitting companies like Microsoft, Google, and Adobe have recognized the power in RIA tools and have sensed their ability to deliver a greatly enhanced online experience that’s smartly delivered, there’s definitely something special about it!

richinternetapplications, ria

Wireframe respects good custom web application development and provides a visual of where the content will be laid out within the websites design. A straightforward wireframe exhibits the setting of a header, main content, footer, sidebars, ad placement, and navigation. Wireframe, or web wireframe, is an undemanding visual guide operates in interface design to advocate the configuration of an interface and interactions between its pages.

Read more: Wireframes are the Blue Prints that Classify and Assign Website Content

Here, We've tried to list out best Ecommerce Shopping Cart softwares.

• osCommerce


• VirtueMart


• Ubercart


• Magento


• Batavi

Balancing aesthetics and information: To maximally engage a surfer, your Custom Web Application Development should be both informative and visually appealing. A beautiful website is shallow and unusable unless it does not speak for the products or services of an organization. You may be able to attract the viewers initially, but the site will prove non-functional in the long run. Hence, it’s important that you make the most of both, beauty and brains! A single cohesive unit combining visual elements and functionality into a wholeness is what a good website is. Design is actually a bridge between the user and the information. Graphics or flash or any other creativity should lead the eye back to the information without cramping the readability or the organization of the web page.

Easy navigation: A good Custom Web Application Development should facilitate an easy navigation with the main navigation block placed clearly visible. A good navigation system would place the navigable items near the top of the layout. Also, there should be a descriptive title with each link for better understanding of the user. Outgoing links and search fields on the web page should be a part of secondary navigation, which should not be the dominating features. A good coherence with the design will do a magic here.

Effective content block: It’s important that you put across the words in an organized manner on the web page. Graphics can be used to represent a charismatic poetry of words in components or blocks of the web page. Ideally, a web page should have a container, in any form like the body tag, a division tag, or a table, to hold the contents of the page. The main content block should be the focal point of the design. A visitor enters and leaves your website in only a matter of seconds. The content is a binder that can maximize this on-site time period. Therefore, it precedes over everything else on a website. The footer contains important information pertaining to copyright, contact, and legal aspects, and ideally, it should separate the end content from the bottom of the browser.

Impressive identity block: The identity block highlights brand elements like company’s name and logo and ideally places them on the top of each web page. It should go well with the identity and image of the organization and should be able to carry strong brand recognition.

Appropriate amount of empty space: White or empty space is as important as graphics and illustration on a website. It makes a design breathe as it helps the eye to glide around a page and makes for balance and integrity.

Good web page anatomy: Good graphic design should always be accompanied by a sophisticated use of grids. Now, mathematics is getting exploited for website design. Golden ratio, or divine proportion, is a concept of dividing the elements of a composition into a distinct mathematical pattern. Its application to the graphic design can produce aesthetically superior layout designs.

These six golden rules applied for custom Custom Web Application Development can lead to an admirable and lovable Custom Web Application Development work that serves a good practical purpose.

The following are some basic popular models that are adopted by many custom web application development companies.

1. System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model
2. Prototyping Model
3. Rapid Application Development Model
4. Component Assembly Model

1. System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Model

This is also known as Classic Life Cycle Model (or) Linear Sequential Model (or) Waterfall Method. This model has the following activities.

* System/Information Engineering and Modeling

Software is perpetually of an outsized system or business, work starts by creating the needs for all system elements and then allocating some subset of these requirements to software.

* Software Requirement Analysis

This process is also known as possibility study. In this phase, the development team visits the customer and studies their system. They examine the requirement for possible software automation in the given system. By the end of the possibility study, the team provides a document that holds the diverse specific recommendations for the candidate system.

* System Analysis and Design

In this phase, the software development process, the software's general structure and its gradations are defined. In terms of the client - server technology needed for the package architecture, the database design, and the data structure design etc. are all helpful in this phase.

* Code Generation

The design should be interpret into a machine readable form. The code generation step achieves this task. If the design is executed in a detailed manner, code generation can be accomplished without much complication.

* Testing

Once the code is generated, after that the software program testing starts. Different testing methodologies are available to unravel the bugs that were committed during the previous phases.

* Maintenance

The software will unquestionably experience change once it is delivered to the customer. There can be many reasons for this change to occur. Change could happen because of some surprising input values into the system.

2. Prototyping Model

This is a cyclic version of the linear model. In this model, once the need examination is over and the design for an example is complete, the development process begins. Once the prototype is shaped, it is given to the customer for evaluation. The customer tests the package and gives his/her feed back to the developer who purify the product according to the customer's precise expectation.

3. Rapid Application Development (RAD) Model

The RAD model is linear sequential software development processes that highlight an extremely short development cycle. The RAD model is a "high speed" adaptation of the linear chronological model in which rapid development is attained by using a component-based construction approach. Used primarily for information systems applications, the RAD approach includes the following phases: Business modeling, Data modeling, Process modeling, Application generation, and Testing and turnover.

4. Component Assembly Model

Object technologies supply the technical framework for a component-based procedure model for software engineering. The object oriented paradigm highlights the construction of classes that summarize both data and the algorithm that are used to maneuver the data.

All these different software development models have their own advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, in the contemporary commercial software development world, the synthesis of all these methodologies is included.