@Tarique : Haha. So that’s the “backend accessed via web services” approach.

@Tim : Thanks, that’s the kind of tips I was looking for.

@Mrinal : Whoa, nice flow list … Thanks for the insight, I did want to confirm that templates are not used as much in this way of development.

@Manish : The title was meant to indicate only the conflict of interest w.r.t. the V of MVC (templates vs RIAs), not to be taken in general terms

But there is a change in how the backend is designed, right? Previously, most of the work would be done in the controller but now a proper API has to be designed so that the workflow can be invoked by the RIA…

@Raghu : Yes, I agree, but what I was referring to was the contention of how the system is built, specifically w.r.t. the V of MVC and how it affects the backend design

1. I will look at what data I have

2. What does the user want (slightly different from Mrinal’s approach as I think you cant deliver to the users what you dont have, atleast, without tricking them)

3. See what Technology you are using at the backed & what your front end can consume (like Manish says)

4. Then decide on what approach I take - REST, Web Services, AMF, RTMP … etc

BTW, check out the new PyAMF (http://pyamf.org/). It provides AMF support for Python.

Instead of generating the HTML view, now your web dev framework (be it Rails or Django or whatever) generates XML or JSON or whatever format that can be consumed easily by your RIA. That’s all.

As a Flex developer, you code to the REST-based APIs. You’re not even aware of what’s enabling that. You don’t even know what the guys on the server side are using. As long as they speak HTTP and XML, you’re good.

Flex/Silverlight is not putting your server-side frameworks out of business. It’s just taking over the responsibility of the UI.

1. Start from what the user wants to do.
2. Forget about the underlying technologies
3. Design the best way the user could do what he wants
4. Now choose the best front end technology (RIA if needed) to achieve the above design
5. If the current technologies cannot achieve your design goto step 2.
6. Now think about the data that the application needs to pull off the above design
7. Then think about the server stack that would help you read and write this data as fast as possible or at least as fast as needed to sustain the above experience.
8. If current technologies cannot achieve 7 goto step 2
9. Check if this server stack will scale to your needs, if not go to 7
10. Check any other aspects important to sustain the experience, if fail goto 2 or 7
11. Check if you have the skills to build in all the above technologies/platforms if not then either learn the new skills or goto 2 or 7

Sorry for the rather long flow, I started off writing some simple points

Anyways coming to your question ..

Yes, the templates have no use in 99% of the cases, although I have seen some cases where generation may make sense .. FLOB framework for SAP BSP is a good example http://code.google.com/p/flob/ .. you have to note that the kind of RIAs you can create with this approach is very limiting if you want to follow my algorithm above

The interface to the backend data could vary … could be SOAP or Rest based web services that give out XML or JSON .. my favorite one though is AMF .. there are AMF servers available for several backend technologies … LCDS, BlazeDS, AMFPHP, WebORB for (Java, .NET, PHP or ROR), PyAMF, Flourine, Granite Data Services and several others.

We just don’t do the front end