Rich Internet Application

Nowadays Internet Applications seems to be upgrading to Rich Internet Application. In this article, I am going to cover what makes the people to switch over to Rich Internet Application. Before getting into the picture, first we will see the general architecture of the simple web application.

Simple Web Application Architecture

A simple diagrammatic representation of web application architecture is shown in the above picture. Normally web application will be divided into three layers such as Presentation layer which is responsible for the User Interface section; it will generate the HTML tags which are sent to the client browser to render the application. Business layer will have the complete business logic; all the business scenarios will be validated in this section. Data Access layer will handle the database part, where the stored procedures will be called to fetch the data from the database server.

In many applications presentation and the business layers will be tightly coupled. Whenever the requirement changes, code impact will be in both the layers unless the proper design patterns are applied. Which is the best way to handle this situation? There comes the Riche Internet Application.

Rich Internet Application Architecture

A simple diagrammatic representation of Rich Internet Application architecture is shown in the above picture. From the picture itself, it's clearly understood the presentation logic is kept in the client side, so the presentation layer and business layer are loosely coupled.

Rich Internet Application is offered by the Silverlight from Visual Studio which provides richness to the application and will be like a desktop kind of application. Here the presentation logic is handled by the Silverlight plug-in in the client side (browser). Here I am not going in-depth of handling presentation logic in the client side, just giving an overview about Rich Internet Application.

Advantage of Rich Internet Application

• Users can easily update a part of the page rather than submitting the entire page
• Data gets easily transferred from one form to another form without keeping a user waiting
• More responsive than traditional web application
• Interactive User Interface
• Reduce bandwidth costs from partial page refresh
• Clear presentation and meet customer's expectation.
• Helps building business kind of applications

Hope this article gave an overview of Rich Internet Application.