A light on Silverlight
February 17th, 2008 Filed Under CSS, Javascript, Technology, Thinking Out Loud, browser
Microsoft plugin - Silverlight
What is it?
Silverlight is a RIA technology invented by Microsoft to pull some technology share from Adobe’s Flash.
It is a very lightweight plugin for the browsers(1.1mb) and supports Windows/Mac and is cross browser compatible.
What different has it to offer?
Silverlight to me sounded like Adobe Flex in the beginning, but after going through the white papers, I found that it is quite a bit different than flex in the following scenarios:
- As known always microsoft technology is a RDT(Rapid Development Technology) and this time it has studied the nooks and problems of Flash/Flex development and slapped on the face.
- Silverlight uses javascript and XAML(xml family language) which is crawlable by google search engine robots.
- Silverlight offers a flexible and consistent programming model that supports AJAX, Python, Ruby, and .NET languages such as VB and C#, and integrates with existing Web applications.
Not known too much to me but I think the SDK should be tightly coupled with the .Net environment and the development IDE along with the proprietory framework. Hence, I would say that after everything happens … Microsoft is a “Black-Box” for ever for the time being(will explain later the “Post Gates” notion).
But I like the convensions rather than freeness in Microsoft’s policies because it helps to maintain the consistency.
But I also like the technologies for its scalabilities and extendibilities.This plugin has come up with alike markup(xml familiy) for the UI developers which adobe(formerly macromedia) tried to push in late 2001 in the product called “flex” which almost does the same thing atop of flash player.
Flex separated the data and the UI part for the ease of use for the UI developers and introduced an xml based language for it … called “MXML”.
Microsoft as always followed and made a better logo than flex and atop added the biggest solution of crawling the content for search engines.
Its been in the market for quite a long time in its alpha and beta versions but Microsoft has only started marketing this product in a very recent past. Let us see how the market responds to this…
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