Context is when you look at a situation from a perspective and generally fall into a predefined segment. In that, if I look at say Microsoft Word, my context of use is to read a document - yet others may use word to construct a document. So different roles play different parts, thus the segments of the technology is defined by context. A RIA runtime, is one of these products that can reshape and redefine context under the guise of being passive while unbeknown to others, it's quite aggressive in the way it hijacks segments of use. A couple of years ago, I meet up with a fellow-RIA developer, who showed me approaches to using the runtime that I guess challenged the way in which I've approached technology. The way in which he did this, was he showed be a before and after approach to the same software, yet one had RIA and one had HTML. It was pretty much a straight forward deal; on one side you had an ugly HTML User Interface (UI) while on the other you had this rich vibrant UI. The rich vibrant UI was the easier sell, as lets face it, we do tend to at times judge a book by its cover - sorry, it does happen. Yet, one thing that stood out from the start that I couldn't quite explain to others that he conveyed to me was that the perception was changed or be it, context. Join discussion...

The application has a front-end Flex built swf which is the microsite and is populated by an XML file (front-end not included here in the demo). The backend builder and CMS is built using ColdFusion and a MySQL database outputting the above XML file. Join discussion...

Some cool stuff about WPF/XAML Join discussion...