Rich Internet Applications for SLA Research

Rich Internet Applications (hereafter, "RIA") represent a major advance in the toolset available to researchers in some areas of second language acquisition. By combining proprietary technologies such as Macromedia's Flash Player and the Flash Communication Server with open source software such as the Linux operating system, Apache server, PHP scripting language, and MySQL database (a collection very frequently referred to as "LAMP"), researchers can build their own networked applications (frequently referred to as "movies" among Flash developers) that can gather text, audio, and video data as well as user interaction data.