Some people think this could be the year of RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

For a while, the main commercial player for RIAs was Adobe's Flex. We started building an application in Flex back when it first came out, actually before it came out. At the time, we felt held back by HTML. We wanted to give our users the ability to do really complex things that you just couldn't do with HTML and Javascript five years ago. So we gave Flex a try. Too bad it didn't work.

The application we built was slow and we worried it would break as we added more features. Plus the licensing for Flex 1.0 was not very friendly. We scrapped the project and concentrated on plain HTML/CSS and plenty of Javascript. Fortunately we were able to do a lot of really good things with this approach. We have AJAX and rounded corners, all the things a good Web 2.0 product needs. But there are still some areas where a more powerful UI would be helpful.

Flex 3.0 is due out soon and it looks very promising. Adobe has changed the license model and improved performance. They also added some really interesting technology like Adobe AIR which allows Flex applications to live on your desktop, outside the browser.

We have also learned a few things about doing good UI for web applications. We still feel like Web applications should be built with HTML/CSS and Javascript. But there are times when a little extra sugar wouldn't hurt. I don't think you'll see us completely replacing our current UI with an RIA, but you may see specific places where we use the rich capabilities of an RIA platform to improve the user experience.

Flex is by no means the only option we are evaluating. Microsoft's Silverlight, Google's Wet Toolkit, OpenLaszlo and more each provide enough muscle to solve most complex UI problems. I don't know if 2008 is the year of RIAs, but it sure looks a lot more promising than 2003 did.