What’s SAP doing to help customers infuse Web-based apps with rich-client functionality?
It’s nearly impossible to achieve a RIA architecture – even on one of the many RIA stacks – unless you’ve done a decent job of service-orienting the underlying capabilities you want to access. You need the metadata that describes not just the business process execution, but also the metadata that describes conceptually what the service is doing, how it can be used, and how it should adapt to different device capabilities in order to give you a rich application. That could be on a PDA or a smart phone as well as on widgets, Flash-type experiences as well as dynamic HTML Ajax-types of environments.
According to SAP Enterprise 2.0 has these multiple aspects that need to work cohesively.
- Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
- services-oriented architecture (SOA),
- metadata,
- model-driven architecture (MDA)
- event-driven architecture (EDA)
Front end technologies (Web 2.0 functionality):
- portal,
- widgets,
- RSS,
- wikis,
- blogs and
- Ajax technologies
Another two interesting trends mentioned in this Q&A are that:
- The run times are in Flash
- The development environment is NetWeaver
Look at the list of TLAs (three letter acronyms). You can read more in this Q&A: SAP on Rich Apps, Architecture and AJAX based Portal Environments.