Rich Internet Applications - The Future of the Secondary Desktop

by Rob Carpenter, PhD, CTO, Dorado Corporation
October 2005

The complexity and length of the mortgage process make streamlining and automation a very costly and difficult proposition. Throughout the process, there are many touch-points involving both internal departments and external partners whose activities need to be coordinated. Traditionally, these touch points have not been well integrated because most lenders do not implement the best technologies to address their specific challenges, often resulting in an environment that blends both manual and automated processes. This translates into islands of automated processes that have to be bridged by manual intervention—phone calls, faxes, Fed-Exes—which slows things down considerably.

With manual barriers blocking connections between functional islands, it becomes very difficult for all of the players involved in the mortgage process to collaborate, and even to get the information they need to do their jobs. For example, simply determining borrower eligibility, getting status on an in-process loan, or receiving the latest rates can require hours or even days of time, while ordering documents or settlement services can require weeks. And of course, all of this means high communications costs.

Distributing mortgage applications over the Internet provides the ubiquity of access, ease of integration, and interoperability lenders need to more efficiently and cost-effectively automate the mortgage process from end-to-end.

Over the past 4-5 years, mortgage technology vendors and internal IT have embraced the Internet as a vehicle for delivering lending applications. As a result, some form of Web-based lending system has probably been introduced into your work processes. However, what these systems offer in terms of universal access to information, services, and applications is sometimes overshadowed by what is lost in client-side functionality for the power user. Browser-based application interfaces are constrained by the limitations of HTML and JavaScript, and do not provide critical capabilities that users of client-server applications currently enjoy, including:

• The ability to write to the local hard drive
• The ability to work offline (when not connected to the Internet)
• The ability to interact with the local operating system and applications
• The ability to execute multiple tasks in parallel

Particularly on the Secondary desk, you may have noticed the limitations of Web-based user interfaces. Secondary processes are extremely complex, involving multiple steps and sophisticated decisioning capabilities. Your job requires a high level of interaction with the application itself, and for some of you, Web-based applications may seem like a step backward, closer to the “green screen” of the mainframe than the highly usable client-server applications you had become used to. Every time you click on something to update even the smallest piece of information, the entire screen has to refresh. This means productivity slows down, you spend a lot of time waiting for, and even losing, critical information. With transactions as complicated as those that occur on the secondary desk, sometimes moving to HTML-based Web applications just doesn’t make sense from a usability, time, and productivity perspective.

The world of the Web-based user interface is changing with the emergence of a new category of what analysts are calling Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIAs combine the benefits of distributed, server-based Internet applications with the rich interface and interaction capabilities of desktop applications. RIA enables very complex logic to be managed through a very simple and intuitive graphical user interface, resulting in a significantly more responsive, effective, and productive user experience. With RIA, the client becomes “thick” again, with much more of the processing occurring on the user’s desktop. In this way, lenders, and users, get the best of both worlds—ubiquitous, anytime access to all of the data, processes and services they need to complete the lending transaction, with all of sophisticated, real-time client-side interaction they have become used to from the best client-server applications.

For example, with RIA, users can navigate pages and save information using common keystroke combinations, just like they would with a regular desktop application. RIA also supports the ability to drag and drop content from one area of an application to another, and updated information in one area automatically updates in all other areas of the application. Also, users rarely have to refresh the page. Alerts and updates to information, status, and pricing happen dynamically, all within the browser. Rich client-side validation also provides feedback in case of data entry errors.

The reason static HTML pages are so limiting for enterprise-class applications is that so little processing occurs on the desktop, creating a “thin” client. In these types of applications, every time a user interacts with the application, the browser sends a message to the server, while the user interface waits until the message returns and the browser refreshes the page. This type of messaging is called “synchronous,” because the receiver must wait for the response. Such user interface interactions are acceptable for navigation-based information access, such as doing a Google search, but are hardly suitable for complex mortgage applications, which require more advanced interaction such as gathering and validating data, performing multi-step operations, and collaborating with other users. RIA-based desktop user interfaces provide a richness and responsiveness that improve usability by allowing tasks to be completed more efficiently, thus saving time and money.

Ancestors of RIAs used Dynamic HTML, a technique for creating interactive websites that combined static HTML with JavaScript. More recently, implementations have added XMLHtmlRequest objects that provide “asynchronous” messages, which avoid browser refresh when obtaining data from the server. This technology is called AJAX: Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, and has been embraced by a number of companies to implement thicker clients. While first-generation dynamic applications provided more sophisticated functionality, they also placed increased demands on network traffic because they required more code to be downloaded for each server request. And in general, the technique is difficult to develop, expensive to maintain, and is not browser independent. This creates an expensive and inefficient proposition for lenders wanting to take their Web applications to the next level in usability.

Enter RIA. RIA takes advantage of more powerful functionality embedded in the browser to make the richness and performance of Web-based user interfaces rival those of desktop applications. Major players such as Microsoft and Macromedia are tossing their hats in the ring to produce the “killer” Rich Internet Application platform. This new crop of tools makes RIA much easier to achieve and provides the needed support to address the issues experienced in first-generation attempts. Macromedia’s RIA approach leverages their near ubiquitous Flash browser plug-in to enable rich user interfaces with minimal data and instructions sent over the network to connect services. These features enable developers to easily create impressive RIA applications. Macromedia’s tool became generally available in March of this year. There is also an open source tool called Laszlo that, like Flex, leverages Macromedia’s Flash technology and implements a very similar approach to Macromedia. And of course, Microsoft has promised to deliver its own platform for RIA development along with “Longhorn,” its next generation Windows operating system.

Longhorn changes the way in which Windows applications are constructed by splitting the user interface out of the underlying code. Microsoft, like Macromedia, has its own XML-based markup language called XAML, supporting future multimedia capabilities. Although Microsoft’s XAML-based applications look quite promising, they will only work on the Longhorn operating system. Microsoft will not ship this technology until at least 2006, and adoption will take considerably longer. This limitation may prevent lenders from embracing the solution for anything but internal enterprise solutions where IT can upgrade the operating system accordingly.

Macromedia’s technology is platform-independent, meaning it can be implemented across any operating system. This makes it a more flexible solution than Longhorn, better for integrating the diversity of legacy systems that exist in many lending organizations today. And with the recent announcement of the merger between Adobe and Macromedia, we anticipate increased investment in Macromedia’s RIA platform.

There is another critical benefit that RIA will deliver to the industry. RIA is a vital component in creating a comprehensive, Web services-based LOS that offers end-to-end automation of loan origination, processing, closing, and delivery. Without the kind of usability and rich functionality RIA can offer, the complex, multi-step, long running transactions that occur in mortgage lending would be difficult to manage on the desktop without expensive and extensive development of custom client-side applications.

My company, Dorado Corporation, has just recently announced our intention to build a fully Web services-based LOS, utilizing second generation RIA on top of a service-oriented architecture, to take mortgage lending a giant leap into the future. For years, mortgage lending has languished in the wasteland of technology that was never entirely “there.” The true promise technology holds for the mortgage industry is finally visible on the horizon.