RIAs, Microformats, and Collaboration - The Kiwi Project

The Kiwi project takes microformats and collaboration and puts them into a Rich Internet Application. It shows off exactly the kinds of things that RIAs can be, and how they will fit into the wider world of the web. The announcement by Yahoo earlier this week just goes to show that microformats are gaining traction. And as an RIA developer, I see microformats as a fantastic way to bring data from the web and put it into my RIA. RIAs are worthless without data, but they do make for a great experience.

Up to now, RIAs have had trouble gaining traction. Part of this was just that the technology wasn't there yet. But another part of it was that we hadn't figured out how to break the web into consumable bits. Now that we have some great technologies on the horizon, and the web is becoming more "consumable" by the day, people are starting to see the potential of an RIA. The Kiwi project takes the abstract concepts that I talk about here and puts them in code. They don't have a working demo up yet, but when they do I'll be sure to link to it. It's an exciting project and I hope it provides a lot of inspiration for developers thinking about RIAs.