Web apps of the future

Johannesburg, 11 Aug 2009

PowerPoint is not enough anymore; companies now require higher-end solutions with richer Web capabilities and simpler user interfaces to use whenever and wherever they are.

This is according to Adobe's senior director and GM for emerging markets, Yaniv Vakrat, who says the company and the IT industry is in its fourth wave of change, with the development of rich Web capabilities for users.

“We are seeing another growth spurt in terms of company expansion, growth in flash developers' numbers and needs, as well as a growth in the general developer community, especially with the use of mobile devices for work and developments in mobile television,” Vakrat says.

“With our Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) solution, the first platform that blurs the line between Web applications and desktop applications, we are now offering an advanced toolset to developers to create rich Web applications online or offline,” Vakrat adds.

Microsoft's Silverlight 3 is considered Adobe's closest rival in terms of Internet application platforms.

“From a connectivity aspect, we are enabling Web application developers to make use of local processing power on desktops and to publish and updates in near real-time to the Web, or whenever a connection is established,” explains Vakrat. “We extract the problem of porting for developers.”

As an example, says Andrew Lindstrom, regional manager for Adobe Africa, “the South African Revenue Services (SARS) is now able to offer e-filers the option to complete and save information on a single online form, even when their Internet connection goes down. When their connection is up again, the application does automatic reconciliation, ensuring all data is uploaded on the back-end.”

Users do not have to worry about the loss of data already entered or not being able to complete the form when the connection goes down, as it is saved on the PC itself and via the Internet to the SARS database.

“The future of Internet applications is to move to richer applications with more functionality and to reach even further over the Internet than ever before,” Vakrat concludes.