Comparison of User Interface (UI) technologies for distributed Rich Internet Applications (RIA) in the context of Business Process management

1st Supervisor: Prof. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Joachim P. Hasebrook

2nd Supervisor: Prof. Dr.–Ing. Andreas Schrader

In recent times Rich Internet Applications (RIA) picked up their momentum in the development of web applications. This is because of the fact that RIA applications are capable of providing better usability and user experience for web applications. Over the years, it had been realized that usability and user experience play important roles in the development of business applications. In this regard companies started investing significance financial resources to explore usability aspects that are required for business web applications. Many organizations started developing toolkits to support user interfaces required for web development. However toolkits that are available currently do not posses all the usability features that are required for a good business web application. This work explores various usability and user experience aspects that are required for rich internet applications and compares these aspects in web toolkits that are available in current market. Part one of this work starts by exploring the complexities involved in HTML based web applications and how AJAX applications can over come to solve this. Later the definition of rich internet applications is introduced with their technical background. After that the impact of RIA applications in different business applications is explored based on examples available in the current market. Part two of the work starts by exploring how usability aspects made RIA applications more prominent by defining what exactly usability means. Then the difference between usability and user experience is explained. Finally it ends by providing the quality criteria involved in usability and user experience aspects. Part three starts with an overview about RIA web toolkits in the current market by analyzing a reasonable subset of three examples. Later the quality criteria for usability and user experience are applied to those toolkits. In part four of the work conclusions about the work are presented. This brings forth differences, weakness and strengths of toolkits that are considered for comparison. In the end an outlook for the development of future web toolkits is presented.