Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) provide Web application solutions. Adobe defines RIAs as combining the best user interface functionality of desktop software applications with the broad reach and low-cost deployment of Web applications and the best of interactive, multimedia communication.

The end result: an application providing a more intuitive, responsive, and effective user experience. Specifically, the best of the desktop includes providing an interactive user interface for validation and formatting, fast interface response times with no page refresh, common user interface behaviors such as drag-and-drop and the ability to work online and offline.

The best of the Web includes capabilities such as instant deployment, cross-platform availability, the use of progressive download for retrieving content and data, the magazine-like layout of Web pages and leveraging widely adopted Internet standards. The best of communication means incorporating two-way interactive audio and video.

Real Time Data Visualization

When you hear the term "data visualization", you probably immediately think of pie charts, bar charts, and line charts showing sales data, population data, or other historical data. These charts and graphs help us to visualize the data, detect key trends, and make decisions moving forward.

While charts are great for understanding historical data, real-time data can benefit from visualization also. For example, financial transaction data can contain immediately useful trending information that is undetectable without some visualization. The same goes for credit card transactions, website traffic, etc.

Although Adobe Flex is fantastic for traditional data visualization, it is uniquely qualified for visualizing real-time data. This describes some common techniques for collecting data in real-time, visualizing it using traditional charting controls, and applying some more advanced location/mapping controls to further improve the user experience.

Adobe Flex

Flex is a highly productive, free, open source framework for building expressive mobile, web, and desktop applications. Flex allows you to build web and mobile applications that share a common code base, reducing the time and cost of application creation and longer term maintenance.

While Flex applications can be built using only the free Flex SDK, Adobe® Flash® Builder™ software can accelerate development through features like intelligent code editing, step-through debugging, memory and performance profilers, and visual design.

Formerly known as Macromedia Flash, Adobe Flash is a platform that can create immersive and interactive rich applications for the web, desktop and mobile platforms. With Flash, you can create web banners with simple animations, RIAs (Rich Internet Applications), games, streaming contents and online product customization tools. It also supports 3D contents (with hardware acceleration) as well as High Definition Videos. Flash also provides its own robust scripting language called 'ActionScript', making it the ideal tool to turn your imagination into reality. With a capable ActionScript developer/team, the distance it can go will be defined by your imagination.

Developing Interactive Contents with Flash Professional
With the advancement of technology, producing digital content is becoming more and more demanding. On one hand it needs to support more media types like videos, animations, photos and sounds, and, on the other it needs to perform on diverse environments like the web, desktop and mobile platforms. Some contents like e-Learning systems need to have responsiveness, interactivity and visual appeal. Others like Games demand robustness and interactivity, as well as responsiveness. Web banners will need to be lightweight, yet full and visually appealing. Web based product customization tools will need the accuracy of rendering. With Flash Professional, creating the right digital content is becoming easier. Flash is the de facto choice of Rich Internet Applications and Interactive contents.

How Bluecorp can help you with your Flash Development Project
Currently, Bluecorp is the proud employer of the biggest Adobe Certified Experts Group in Sri Lanka. It's a large knowledge pool of diverse technologies with expertise in Flash technologies. Whether it is a simple web banner or a very complicated dashboard application, there is always a reliable solution. Due to the time difference between Sri Lanka and Europe/US, content migrations, updates, bug fixes etc. can be handled with minimum impact. Deadlines are always honored without compromising the quality of work.

What are the expertise of Flash Developers?

• Flash Professional (from version Flash MX to the latest version)
• ActionScript 3 and ActionScript 2
• Flex version 2, 3, 4, 4.5
• Flash Media Server
• Game Development
• Facebook Application Development
• And any idea that our customer brings to us to implement

Microsoft Silverlight is a framework for browser based applications similar to Adobe Flash and Flex. It could be called a lite version of WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for the Internet. Its technology is based on a Smart Client architecture, in which the processing power of the client will also be used by the application, unlike in asp.net applications. Silverlight components can be embedded in HTML.

What can it do?
The Silverlight platform can be used for just about any kind of application. It can be as simple as web banners that display blurbs of text or as complex as media players, streaming music and videos to and from the Internet. It can even be a Business application.

Where to host?
A website containing a Silverlight component/application can be hosted in IIS (Internet Information Service). Once hosted in IIS it'll be a browser application, which also enables the user to install the application once it has loaded and run it out of the browser.

Where can it run?
Silverlight has plug-ins for most of the modern browsers, which can be downloaded and installed similar to Adobe Flash. Currently it can run on Windows or Mac, and it also supports Windows Phone 7. There is also an open source project running in collaboration with Microsoft to enable Silverlight on Windows.

Why Silverlight?
Rich User Interfaces
Silverlight applications have the ability to produce a better look compared with Web Applications. It can also be a better user experience, being more responsive and snappy.

Efficient bandwidth usage
Once the application is downloaded to the client machine the only bandwidth usage will be for data, which is not the case with Web Applications.

Integration with WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)
Silverlight applications have the advantage of easy inter-operation with WCF services to connect to a back-end, enabling Silverlight to be an enterprise level application foundation. WCF RIA (Rich Internet Application) Services have simplified building N-Tier applications with Silverlight.

Backed by Visual Studio and Microsoft Expressions
Silverlight application development is backed by two superb GUI tools: Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Expressions. This could save a lot of development time.

Short Learning Curve
Being able to write client applications in C#/VB means that you can get your existing .Net developers into developing Silverlight with a short learning curve.