Patent threathens RIA   I just learned today that there is a US patent granted today that might threaten RIA  See US Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications  See also United States Patent   Balthaser February    In short  The patentissued on Valentines Daycovers all richmedia technology implementations including Flash Flex Java Ajax and XAML when the richmedia application is accessed on any device over the Internet including desktops mobile devices settop boxes and video game consoles  Its kind of unbelievable that the patent has such a wide ranging use because it covers so many technologies says Bola Rotibi a senior analyst at Ovum an IT advisory firm in London If the patent is enforced broadly she says anybody who does anything with rich applications will have to pay royalties to the company    Presumably this only applies to companies that sell in the US    Java applets I think Java applets are the most popular and most powerful technique to implement RIA beside JavaScript Why is it missing   Promoting a product   Whats the policy on promoting a product on Wikipedia I notice Backbase has put a plug for thier product in the Javascript section    Backbase has not I have put it there more than two months ago Until now it wasnt objectionable The article mentions Macromedia and Laszlo so I do not see the harm in mentioning a Javascriptbased RIA product as well Personally I would like to see the text return perhaps in different form and not be easily dismissed as an advertisement    If I may quote Macromedia is one vendor in this area whose Macromedia Flash technology includes Flash Communications Server Central Breeze and Flex all of which are run in viewers browsers within the Macromedia Flash Player which has a  penetration with current internet users  talk about blatant advertising    Full agreement  If theres a section at the end regarding different libraries to create RIAs perhaps it should be listed alongside its better known competitors  As it stands its a poorlydisguised advertisement stuck in a section it doesnt belong in   Does the Hummingbird link constitute linkspam   I originally put the Hummingbird link there believing that it should be mentioned as a very early pioneer of the concept and possibly still at the most leading edge However to avoid spam confusion problems I removed that link What we must identify is where is the fine line between history and spam Microsoft Google Macromedia get almost universal access to the articles while other companies do not And many times I actually would like to know of the other players Maybe we just need to find the right place for them     phrasing   the phrasing well have to doesnt belong into a encyclopedia unfortunately i feel unable to rewrite it into a better sentence thanks   done    Definition  It would be nice to have a definition of a Rich Internet Application and a comparison to nonrich Internet applications  The article says  much richer userinterface options other than the standard HTML widgets available to browserbased Web applications Richer functionality could be Drag and Drop using a slider to change data calculation that happens on the client eg an insurance rate calculator and do not need to be sent back to the server etc  but all of these except for full draganddrop are easy to implement using standard Javascript  Does a clientside mortgage amortization calculator using only Javascript and no server interaction count as an RIA  How about one that does some serverside fetching for inpage updating using standard tricks  Using javascript is a method see AJAX ria is just a type of application not a type of implementation    How about a tickertype application that gets updates from the server without refreshing the