In my experience, successful RIAs require close co-design between 'client' and 'server' components. Many people think they can "encapsulate" these issues away

In my experience, successful RIAs require close co-design between 'client' and 'server' components. Many people think they can "encapsulate" these issues away but distributed systems break most people's assumption. You can have people who are database experts, Flash or HTML "designers" or mad javascript, actionscript or Silverlight coders -- but if there isn't somebody in charge who understands distributed systems and the restrictions that exist on RIAs, you are d00med.