Note: This article was originally published on SitePoint.

The term Rich Internet Application (RIA) was coined by Macromedia (now Adobe) in 2002. An RIA is a web application—it runs inside a web browser, but looks and feels more like a desktop application. Gartner analysts Mark Driver, Ray Valdes, and Gene Phifer describe RIAs as "the next evolution of the Web" [1] (PDF, 56KB) .

Some of the properties that differentiate an RIA from a traditional web application are:

• a richer user experience
• cross-browser consistency
• the ability to load data without having to refresh the page

Several different technologies can be used to create RIAs, including Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, and Ajax. With ColdFusion 8, Adobe has given developers new tools to quickly and easily create RIAs that are either based on the Flash platform, or use plain old HTML [2] and rely upon Ajax. This article will focus on the new Ajax family of tags and functions; I'll guide you with step-by-step instructions through the challenge of building your first RIA—a simple user manager application—using Adobe ColdFusion 8.

Requirements

If you'd like to play along at home, here's what you'll need:

ColdFusion 8

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• ria_demo.zip (ZIP, 72K)

To follow along at home, download and unzip the code archive to the web root of your local development environment (the files exist in the RIA folder).

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