Ray Horn Neil Balthaser is apparently claiming that he has a patent on RIAs. The patent claim itself looks to be limited to tools that allow the online creation of RIAs/Flash CMS tools. I blogged about this on FlashAnt and there have already been a couple of community members who are mentioning prior art. (I’m copying their comments here to start off the page.)
I’ve set up this page so that we can use it to keep track of prior art relating to this patent. It will no doubt be useful when/if someone has to fight it.
Two similar ‘site building site’ style web applications built by Dave Williamson and Mike Jones (Flashgen). The most advanced one was called Casper (1998 - 2003).
Dave’s Note:
As Mike has commented earlier we were constructing stuff like the ProFX site well before it went live. In fact, I remember having email conversations with balthazer, and a number of others that seemed to be producing ‘engines’ like the proFX one while we were building Casper and its forerunners. Feel free to decompile it, you will see that there are coding conventions from flash 3 (circa 1998) right through to flash MX included in that work.
I also remember that at flash forward 2000 there was an RIA by TinToon that created little flash cartoons using generator. Come to think of it, doesn’t Generator itself fall foul of this patent?
Source: Mike Jones (Flashgen) and Dave Williamsom (Bittube) on FlashAnt comments
Moonfruit launched their product around late 1998 / early 1999 (and Macromedia were an investor if my memory serves me correctly on all points).
Source: Mike (Flashgen) on FlashAnt comments
The K12 Virtual School was a large-scale RIA built using Flash 5. Do we have exact dates on when the project started?. People involved: Branden Hall (and Keenan), Charlie Cordova, Aral Balkan... others?
Source: Aral Balkan on FlashAnt blog post
Saepio Technologies, Inc. was granted US Patent 6,931,591 (application on October 15, 1999) which describes a way for a website to do layout for publishing. This publishing can also take the form of websites.
Source: Kenny Root
Worldo (wayback) was an enterprise RIA built and launched in 2000 using Flash 4, Generator, and Vignette StoryServer built with a team led by Bryan Rice. Worldo was an entirely Flash-based RIA that allowed designers to find and specify furniture and other interior design products. You can read a press release announcing the launch of Worldo at the Neocon 2000 convention here.
A quote describing the RIA: “Worldo will deliver to architects and designers the unprecedented ability to quickly search, compare, present, and specify interiors products in a highly graphic environment. "
Source: Bryan Rice
SpecTcl is a guibuilder in Tcl that can write java code which could be web applets... As there is little if any definition of “Rich Media Applications” in the patent, logging into a unix system over the network with ssh and running an X11 gui builder which writes java applets sure seems to qualify (ssh will/would tunnel all of the X traffic, etc. over a single network connection). SpecTcl with java output was definitely released in 1996.It let you drag gui components around, etc.