The Web 2.0 revolution has clearly descended upon the software industry, but many InfoQ.com readers still have to deal with volumes of Web 1.0 code. So, what is one to do with those old applications? In their article, Porting From Web 1.0 To Rich Internet Applications (RIA), James Ward and Shashank Tiwari walk through replacing a Web 1.0 interface with a rich Adobe Flex user interface. In the article, they outline the steps of updating the open source Pentaho Suite dashboard with a Web 2.0 dashboard:
...So we decided to spice up a typical Web 1.0 dashboard to a more interactive and rich dashboard. We did not reinvent the wheel and create the entire application from scratch. Instead we re-mastered the interface and plumbed it into the existing server side infrastructure. In doing so, we realized a quick yet useful transformation. Although our example is a dashboard application, the concepts can be applied to any project that needs to migrate from Web 1.0 to RIA. Our RIA toolkit of choice is Adobe Flex and all our discussion here is in the context of this framework, the Flash VM and the supporting libraries...Follow along as they demonstrate the process of updating the Web 1.0 application.