What is a RIA?

When you wake up in Boise, Idaho, tomorrow morning, perhaps you will check your email while brushing your teeth.  You might listen to some music to get your blood flowing as you get dressed and ready for your day.  Grabbing your laptop as you head out the door, you’ll stop for coffee and something to eat.  The café where you sit will have wireless, and you’ll decide that it’s too nice of a day to be cooped up in the office.

You’ll log in to your company’s custom developed application, respond to the emails you received in the morning, and begin planning an important presentation for that afternoon.  Just when you reach for the save button, the Internet connection will be lost.  This café hasn’t upgraded their equipment in five years – they are still in the dark ages, the Gothic barista will tell you when you inquire, rolling her eyes at the antiquity.  But you’ll just smile, and hit the save button anyway.  In the quiet of no connectivity, you will launch your desktop applications, continue work on a couple of projects, and perhaps even make a few quick phone calls.  Then you will log your customer contact notes and whistle cheerily on your way out the door.

When you get to work, you’ll hook your laptop up and log back into the application — which will have already automatically synced the notes, presentation, and projects you created and saved during the morning at the coffee shop. A notification is waiting for you; one of your customers is requesting a meeting over video chat. After a friendly discussion about the relative merits of bananas versus plantains as an international commodity, you’ll save a recording of the meeting.  You will attach that file to your customer’s card and send a note to your boss to watch it when he has the chance.  He won’t need to worry about having the right media player. It just works.

Immediately following lunch, one of your co-workers might have an issue.  They’ll lose an important phone number, and they’ll be in a meeting.  They’ll panic to you via a text on your cell phone. They need this right at that moment, and you’ll be stepping into a meeting yourself.  No problem! You can remind the salesperson that he can log into the application from his phone and he’ll be able to see everything you can.  He’ll be able to see the notes you made that morning, the sales you will have confirmed three minutes prior with the client in Peru, and add his own information to the transactions.

With long-distance real-time collaboration, you and your counterpart in L.A. will put together the package that you’ll present to the client tomorrow night at the Gala.  In the afternoon, before you head home to get dressed up, you could calculate your probable total sales margin for the month using the same application you’ll have been using all day.

Tomorrow, you won’t be worrying about silly things like real-time data push, or even care about how additional run-time makes your application run seamlessly. You’ll be happy that you no longer have to adjust your mental work-flow around clunky old-world software. You’ll be thankful for the application because you can keep your contact and sales information in one place and retrieve them from anywhere. Only it’s not just an application.  It’s a rich Internet application that can work flawlessly on your desktop, in your mobile phone, and on the web all at once.

That is how a RIA works.