Welcome to Flash Ant: The Blog about RIAs

Flash Ant is a new blog by the RIA-crazy folks over at Bits And Pixels. We have been building RIAs for the longest time -- before the word RIA was even coined (let's just say "Flash 5" and leave it at that!) :) It's great to see RIAs finally beginning to enter into the mainstream and we're very excited to be part of this fast-paced evolution.

For those of you who are new to RIAs, RIA stands for "Rich Internet Application." It's a marketing and market-defining term invented by Macromedia to describe what we would otherwise call a "rich-client web application." RIAs are made possible today due to the state-maintaining client-side technology known as Flash. Using the Flash format, we can architect rich-client web applications that rival the usability and robustness of traditional desktop applications without the deployment (and redeployment) costs associated with traditional applications. Of course, this is just one advantage of an RIA and we will be discussing others, as well as current engineering limits on the state of the art, on this blog in the coming days.

The Flash Ant blog gets its name from, and is the home of, the Flash Ant package for Apache Ant and Flash MX 2004 Professional. Flash Ant includes an Apache Ant task for Flash for integrating Flash into the build process of Rich Internet Applications. We will continue to actively maintain and support Flash Ant as well as any tools and utilities we may release in the future.

Stay tuned for lots more information on RIA architecture, usability and user interface design and testing, design patterns, Flash, Flex, J2EE and other mouth-watering subjects in the coming days and weeks.

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