As the needs and expectations of online retail, e-commerce, entertainment and education interests have grown, so have the tools that define the most powerful and engaging elements such as charts, graphs, sound, video, data entry widgets and animation. There are many examples of inspired retail-based rich Internet applications (RIA).

RIA development, as found today in Flex and historically in Flash, shows many similarities with application development in languages such as C++, .NET, and Java. Over the years since their introduction, software engineers using these languages have developed best practices for managing and executing the development of large and complex applications. Many of these lessons can also be effectively applied to the development of RIAs.