For a while now I’ve been puzzling over what exactly is meant by the term “Rich Internet Application” or RIA. Microsoft wants the initials to stand for “Rich Interactive Application” but it is losing that battle – see this great post by Dare Obasanjo. It is Adobe’s term, but it has never been clear to me exactly what it means. I’ve seen it refer to everything from internet-connected desktop applications, to Flash applications running in the browser, or even plain old HTML and JavaScript.

The way to understand a term is to look at its origin, and here I got a big clue from Adobe’s Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch. At a press briefing during Adobe Max Europe last week, Lynch described what happened:

The whole move of Adobe to rich internet applications was actually driven by the community. It was people using the Flash player about 2001, 2002, to start creating not just interactive media or animation experiences, but application experiences. The first one at that time was something called the Broadmoor Hotel reservation system. It was a 5 or 6 page HTML process to check out and they were having a lot of drop off. They turned that into a one-screen check out process in Flash, and they saw their reservations increase by 50%. We actually named that trend. We thought OK, we can do more to support that, and we called it Rich Internet Applications. Then we focused on enabling more of those to be made with these technologies, so a new virtual machine in Flash player, the Flex framework, Flex Builder, all of that was driven by some of those early developers who were pushing the boundaries.

So there you have it. The Broadmoor hotel case study, which I recall seeing demonstrated at the 2002 Macromedia devcon, was apparently a significant influence on the evolution of the Flash player. The first press release about it was in November 2001. The case study is still online, and the application is still around today.

I don’t think we will get closer than this to a definition. Adobe will continue to use it to mean Flash applications; Microsoft will continue to try and de-brand it – the same way it tried to use “blogcast” in place of “podcast”, according to this article. I tend to agree that the concept is bigger than Adobe; but language is organic and cannot be so easily manipulated.