Requirements for Rich Internet Application Design Methodologies

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are quickly becoming the de facto standard for interactive web applications on the Internet, featuring rich interfaces that increase user usability and efficiency. These technologies increase the complexity of implementing web applications, making it difficult to address non-functional requirements such as application quality and reliability. There is much activity in developing modelling languages for web applications, but RIAs introduce additional concerns for application developers. Without identifying the requirements of interactive web applications, we cannot quantitatively compare different formal methodologies nor suggest they are robust enough for industry. In this paper we present a comprehensive list of web application modelling requirements, derived from previous work and existing real-world interactive web applications. We use these requirements to then propose an industry-inspired benchmarking application, which allows us to evaluate approaches to handling the complexity of modelling real-world applications.