O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Ever noticed how certain phrases seem to do the rounds in the tech industry? One such phrase I see a lot is "eat your own dog food" or more charmingly "dogfooding". I can relate this to a number of RIAs which I use day-to-day when developing, managing and promoting RIAs which I thought might be of use to share in no particular order (and with no affiliation).

I've been involved in web development for about 12 years now and have always been involved in the early stages and client facing aspects of the development cycle. More often than not I turned to very low-fi methods of sketching the early versions of a UI such as paper, whiteboard or Powerpoint. None of these are ideal and the early agreed upon designs seem to get lost along the way. Also it's hard to make changes to non digital mockups. Recently I've been playing around with with Balsamiq Mockups which seems to be a great quick and dirty design tool for developers, designers and those who aren't tech savvy at all.

I have no doubt that nearly everyone is familiar with the phrase "the right tool for the job" when it applies to construction. Well, that same adage applies directly to computer software and especially RIAs.

In February, 2008, Nitobi ran an online survey about web design and development tools and technologies. They reached out to web designers and developers through blogs, Facebook, discussion forums and so forth. 570 respondents participated, some highlights are here.