RIA: more than a Nice Face

Nowadays, a new generation of Web applications built over Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) technologies is quickly attracting users eager for experiencing the richness of desktop applications together the incredible profits of networked available resources and services. RIA technologies can provide a complete rich user experience: richer and more interactive user interfaces supported by data and business logic at the client side and efficient bandwidth usage. Indeed, new and complex usage scenarios of those applications are devised, such as disconnected operation modes or multidevice (ubiquitous) access. Last RIA technologies bring new design concerns and issues increasing strongly the complexity of the development and evolution of that new breed of Web applications. However, only fledgling software engineering approaches have been proposed for RIA development, far from a complete and systematic methodology. Not only user interface concerns must be tackled, but adequate specification of data and business logic distribution and its consequences should be carefully considered. The main objective of this work consists on clearly identify and provide an unequivocal specification of the main issues and design concepts involved in the development of RIAs within data and business logic distribution concerns, eventually defining a complete and systematic methodology for model-driven RIA development.