Part 4: Exposing Services Through Rich User Interfaces

A rich User Interface (rich UI) is an interface that is similar in look and feel to that of a desktop application. These types of interfaces carry advantages and disadvantages, but have the power to leverage Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) by exposing the advantages of such an architecture to end users rather than just to IT. Although there is no universally accepted standard definition for rich UIs, there are some key characteristics that are typically found in applications that are considered rich in nature: increased responsiveness, asynchronous communication with the server and behaviors not available in HTML alone.