Alone, SOA and Ajax both promise considerable payback to IT, but combined the two technologies are two sides of the same coin enabling a new class of Web-based applications called ‘Rich Enterprise Applications’ or REAs.
Not only does REA capitalize on the technical strengths of Ajax and SOA, it also provides a platform for dramatic productivity gains by empowering end-users to interact and integrate in ways never seen before.
Ajax is a set of technologies which enable browser-based Rich Internet Applications (RIA), a category which describes rich ‘desktop-like’ interactive applications running in a browser. RIAs are enabled not only by Ajax, but Flex, Flash, Java and Microsoft’s XAML as well. In terms of standards, industry commitment, and rate of adoption, Ajax will continue to be the enterprise RIA technology of choice. So when we talk about RIA in the context of this article, we are referring to Ajax.
