Now that we are familiar with web 2.0, the web development industry is looking toward Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs. Due to their powerful features - rapid development, platform independence, and traditional desktop-like rendering – RIA’s have greatly attracted the web development community. Experts are writing whitepapers on RIAs and developers are developing RIAs using different technologies. IT companies are developing platforms and technologies to facilitate the development of RIAs. Everybody is contributing to shape the future of web development – the RIAs. Recently, an important development in this field has surfaced– the collaboration of Adobe Systems and Zend Technologies to build easy-to-use RIAs that will help business owners make real-time decisions and increase employee productivity.

Adobe Systems, after taking over Macromedia, claims RIAs are their baby.  Being the major contributor, Adobe has developed different tools, clients, frameworks, servers and services to build RIAs.  Adobe Creative Suite 4, Adobe Flex Builder 3, Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR and Adobe Flex are just a few.  Its collaboration with Zend is another step toward the development of a powerful, yet simple, RIA.

Zend PHP Company has released a press release, Zend to Collaborate with Adobe, on its website detailing the purpose and goals of this collaboration. 

The collaboration of Adobe and Zend is quite natural. By sharing the same platform base, the Zend PHP community using Zend Studio warmly welcomed the Adobe Flex Builder and developed different RIAs using Flex on the client and PHP on the server. This strong uptake among PHP developers led both companies to this collaboration. On the other hand, Zend aims to deliver PHP users world-class experiences using standard internet technologies. All these efforts to develop rich and efficient internet applications seem quite promising. This collaboration will definitely result in the development of some great applications and tools and will be remembered as the beginning of a new era in the history of RIAs and the web development industry.