-By Ashraf Alam
To enable web users to have rich user experience (RIA -- Rich Interactive Application) Silverlight is going to take place a major role in the current trend of web technology. This is a browser plug-in that enriches the capability of the web applications to have high quality multimedia, graphics, animation and interactivity.
Software giant Microsoft introduced this technology to open a new track in web. Along with several similar features like Flash, Silverlight includes more powerful infrastructure. Silverlight 1.0, the first version has been released in last September, with multiple browser and operating system capability. Code named as "Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E)" Silverlight enables web application developers to include several rich user experience feature like animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback. Unlike Flash, Textual content become more searchable and indexable as it doesn't require textual content to be compiled in it. The core idea behind this useful idea is XAML. Silverlight uses XAML which is a markup language and can be used for marking up vector graphics and animations.
In short the core features of Silverlight can be described in following way:
- 1. Cross browser
- 2. Cross operating system
- 3. Consistent experience no matter where in runs
- 4. To run in the browser end, it requires a very small plug-in (1.38 MB)
- 5. Video and audio streaming
- 6. Drag, turn and zoom functionality
- 7. Reads and updates data without requiring the whole web page to be refreshed
The next version of Silverlight, V2.0 which will be released by this year. This major release will include WPF UI Framework, rich controls, rick networking support (REST, POX, RSS, WS communication), rich .NET base class support etc. The V2.0 beta will be released by first quarter of this year.
Checkout the official web site of Silverlight for details.
desme team has already started working to include high end user experience in web applications. In near future we'll be starting releasing the products which will be built on Silverlight technology.
Cheers!
posted @ Saturday, February 02, 2008 10:25 PM