Udooz!

So many frameworks, tools and platforms available for us to develop RIA applications.  One such framework from Gizmox is “Visual Web GUI” which provides unified approach to develop web applications using ASP.NET platform with “Empty-Client” model. 

The catchy point is you do not need to know too much about underlying technology.  You can also port WinForm applications into web.

You could be a win form developer or web developer.

How does it different from others?

Since I did not fully evaulate this platform, I can simply say “this framework clearly segregates the responsibilities between browser and server”.  Server does business processing and browser handles user interaction.  Looks very adhoc and no different.  Gizmox is termed this as “empty client”.

Empty Client

We are known and worked with “Thick”, “Thin” and “Fat” clients.  Empty?  Points taken from their web site is

The Empty Client approach combines for the first time on web, the best of both desktop and web environments. An optimized protocol makes server side power, typically achieved with “Thin client” available for data centric web applications, with “Thick Client” scalability and performance.

They assured that this framework lets developers create desktop-like Web applications in no time using their existing skill sets with no re-learning, no retooling, and without the traditional complexities of the web. It also eliminates traditional security concerns, by facilitating literally Empty clients – no open services, no data, no logic, or any other exposed security hazards are left on the client.

The server is all in their approach.  Client only captures data and send it to server, and display data from server.  Even server provides display format of the data.

This model is mainly useful in cloud computing.  However, I do not know wy making the powerful client as “dump” and overloading the server.

Visit http://www.visualwebgui.com/Developers/Introduction/tabid/556/Default.aspx for more details.
codeproject

Problem

Consume the application logic from presentation tier with domain entities those are specialized for this tier with minimal plumbing.

Forces

• Set of code (validation, authentication, etc) to be written specific to presentation tier and the same needs to be written specific to business tier.
• Automated way to share the logic between the tiers with trusted boundaries.
• Agile way to consume business logics to RIA (particularly Silverlight) applications.
• Line of RIA based business application those are not required to scale of SOA.
• Data driven applications those are again not required to scale of SOA.

Solution

.NET RIA Services framework supports end-to-end use of data from DAL (data access layer) of your choice to presentation tier.  The data can be shaped for presentation tier.  This framework was built on ASP.NET to define and support a pattern for exposing a set of operations on your domain object to presentation tier particularly Silverlight.  A domain object contains set of CRUD and custom business operations with domain entities.  In this framework, the domain object is called as “DomainService”.  Once you define a DomainService at business tier based on the data from database using ADO.NET Entity Framework or LINQ2SQL, this framework generates code corresponding client tier code that can be used for data binding, validation, authentication, etc.

The following image which was taken from .NET RIA Services guide gives you to understand how this framework is designed to scale across different presentation technologies and DAL components.

References

• Download .NET RIA Services and walk-through manual at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=76bb3a07-3846-4564-b0c3-27972bcaabce&displayLang=en
• Expect article related to .NET RIASservices in this blog.