More than a year ago, Home&Abroad made rich Internet applications an integral part of its business strategy. The online itinerary-planning company needed a more engaging online customer experience – longer and more in-depth interactions are of greater value to the company and its advertisers and travel agency partners. Home&Abroad makes money via advertising and by selling subscriptions to airlines and travel agencies that like the functionality of the site.
That’s where rich Internet applications (RIAs) come in, letting customers efficiently harness diverse content, including maps, widgets, rules engines, and other services needed to develop itineraries, book reservations, and buy items for their journeys. The customized application captures preferences and calls a rules engine that suggests activities and events at a given destination that meet travelers’ interests. Hotels, restaurants, and points of interest can be overlaid on a Google map, with more information and even inclusion in an itinerary just a click away.
Home&Abroad based its RIA development strategy on a set of Ajax integrated tools and libraries called Prototype. Its success is a mark of how rapidly Web development is advancing, thanks to better usability and integration.
“Ajax environments have really evolved,” says Kris Thompson, Home&Abroad’s CTO. “A year ago, it was challenging to get the application to work in different browsers. Today, that is no longer the case.”
And Thompson prizes the ability to tap a wide variety of add-ons. “What we can’t find directly from the Prototype library to handle technical programming details, we can likely find from the open-source subcommunity that has grown up around Prototype and Ajax,” he says.
The application also interoperates with functions supplied by partners through a growing ecosystem of Web services. For example, vacationers can take advantage of personal shopping widgets in Amazon.com to make purchases related to trips they’re planning.
Thompson warns that RIAs alone won’t make for a profitable online venture – any rich Internet app reaches its full potential only when the improved user experience aligns with the underlying business process, so it delivers a relevant result. Miss this mark and you’ll end up, at best, with expensive eye candy. At worst, the resulting application will inject inefficiencies into the business.
RIA's are certainly excellent for delivering much more responsive and useful Web applications out to customers, remote salespeople, and suppliers.
But, right now most identity and security for RIA's is a case of "Roll Your Own". If an organization wants to control the usage of RIA's so that only known users can use them, or to protect them against content-level attack (of which there are many for Web 2.0), they generally try to figure this out themselves.This is a recipe for disaster.
The key example of this interesting article is Home & Abroad. I played around with the site for a while, and I was't impressed by their Itinerary editing tool. It uses faceted search, but it didn't work very well. Based on industry best practices I distilled the top 10 rules for good faceted search, and wrote about this on the customer engagement weblog. I hope this is a useful addition to this article.
I read the story first here at IE, then saw it on the ('Big Screen') cover of Information Week. I get IW on Tuesday versus Mondays now so..I didn't realize how big of a report the BIG REPORT was.
Is the new on-demand web platform with the desktop-like environment enabling travel companies of all sizes to build company sites and have location-specific content currently available for a demo?
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