RIA v/s Ajax ....AOM?

What will eventually make it?

I really wouldn't hazard a guess there!! All I know is that the future of the web is going to be much different from what we see now. Nobody is going to enter something to a web page and wait for it to post that data to some back-end server while they see a blank white page till the server finishes processing it and shows them something worthwhile. That's really boring, isn't it?

How about a web page (I have my grouse against the term 'web page' which I'll come to later) which does the processing in the background while it shows you something relevant or interesting or entertaining or all of those three while its doing that processing?
Cool, that's where RIA's and AJAX come in. Whats the difference between the two you ask? ...hmm, well they both hope to achieve the same objective, which is keeping the user busy with something relevant/interesting/entertaining while it does some processing on the server side. So what makes one a winner over the other? I still wont commit to putting down in writing which one is better.. not simply because I don't want to look like a fool who spoke too soon a few months down the line, but also because I feel that its not really a question of which one is better. Both can be used to achieve the same amount of richness to a web page. Its just a matter of preference, feasibility and skill availability.

Back in the days of yore when everything was a web page, the novelty and usability of these web pages was limited to just a read only display of information that could be available anywhere on a computer connected to the internet. Then people started to want more. They wanted the ability to add stuff to what they saw and so the web form was born. Users could now input data in a form which would carry that data to the server and then it would magically appear on that web page a few seconds later. That was the cool factor back then. Nobody cared about having to look at a blank screen while that happened. Well, now they do. Enter RIA...

RIAs like those based on Adobe's AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Java's JavaFX are basically frameworks that add on to the browser's capabilities, while Ajax does everything using what the browser ships with, which is javascript and XML. The idea is to have a web application and not a web page anymore. We want to see the rest of the page while that little corner on the top of the very same page gets the latest stock quotes. We are also getting used to the autosave feature while we type of our emails, courtesy GMail, for being the leader in that arena. How can all this be possible in a simple web page? Well, it can't! The browsers of today need to be a lot more capable than they were back in the old ages. Its simply not lightweight thin client anymore. It's doing a lot more that just displaying colorful pages and graphics. Its interacting with the user and providing immediate feedback. It needs to remember the user's preferences and what the user did last on repeated visits to the same site. Can all this be possible using the DOM available now? We might need to revamp the whole browser as being not just an document host but an application host. I coin the term AOM here which stands for Application Object Model. :)

My thoughts on AOM:
I feel we need to take a step forward from where the browsers stand today. We are talking about multi-user downloadable applications that dont need to download their runtime as well. This wont be a copy of the JAVA runtime or a .Net runtime where heavy applications download to the client and connect to various other servers directly from the client computer. A web site on a url will send an application to the client and not just a simple javascript heavy page.

The browsers of tomorrow wont be devices used to just browse web pages. They will be fully functional application hosts. They will be made specific to an OS much like browsers are today; but the applications they host will be written just once, much like a webpage is today. The visual rendering, statefulness, data persistence, security, etc. will be taken care of by the application host, what we call today a browser. That IMHO is true RIA :)

Your comments please...