Necessity of methodologies to model rich Internet applications

Several methodologies and tools have been proposed for Web applications design and development. However, traditional Web applications are still inadequate to support the interaction and presentation functionalities demanded by the users. Recently, rich Internet applications (RIAs) have been proposed as an answer to these problems providing new levels of interactivity and presentation. The use of RIAs is growing exponentially; nevertheless there is a lack of full development methodologies in this sense. This document outlines the main features, which should be modeled in RIAs and proposes an evaluation process in order to obtain the suitability of a methodology to accomplish this goal. We also use this process to evaluate the suitability of several existing Web, multimedia and hypermedia methodologies to demonstrate that each one accomplishes only few RIA features, so new methodologies or extensions of the actual methodologies become necessary.