Hello,
I want to develop a web application and I am not sure whether I should do it in DHTML or Silverlight. I could use the rich UI capabilities of Silverlight, but on the other hand
Silverlight is heavy on the client and not many users installed it. Are there any solutions or suggestions?
thank you very much
mark
I'm deep into the process of building CSLA Light right now, so I can offer some Silverlight insight. I'm not an AJAX expert, but as I understand it, the trick to success with AJAX is twofold:
I find it hard to get overly excited about spending huge amounts of time troubleshooting every browser out there and tweaking the javascript until it works everywhere (or at least there's a compromise everywhere). Just not my cup of tea...
Silverlight offers a somewhat more consistent environment, though there are still some variations due to browser differences. Far fewer than with AJAX/DHMTL though.
The challenge you'll face today with Silverlight is that it is in beta - and it has a fair number of bugs/quriks. You can usually work around them, but they are there and can cause a quite a bit of pain.
CSLA Light can help to some degree, because we've been working through some of the primary pain points and building the workarounds/solutions into CSLA Light.
But ultimately I think it comes down to this:
Silverlight will allow you to run your business objects on the actual client. You can get a comparably interactive experience to WPF or Windows Forms while doing all your work in C# or VB. With CSLA Light, you can reuse a large percentage of your existing business object code when building a Silverlight application, and still get all that great user interactivity.
AJAX/DHTML is still fundamentally a server-side world. Yes, you can run code in the client, but it won't be VB or C#, and you can't easily have the same code running on the client and the server. There's just a substantial impedance mismatch between the client world and server world when doing AJAX. And that can be OK - but you must architect for it, and plan for it, and develop a broader set of skills to do the same work.
Ultimately I am convinced that Silverlight is going to become the dominant platform for business apps - not just on the web, but on the desktop too.
In the short term though, the bugs and quirks in the beta make it pretty comparable to AJAX in terms of the difficulties you'll probably face in using it.
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