Many businesses are using internet and networking in a great way to enhance their performance. Web based applications are a preferred platform these days when it comes to business information systems. Combining the communication capabilities of internet with the exceptional development platforms available on the World Wide Web, such an application serves a highly functional, cost effective, and secure platform to improve your business operations. It can be considered as a multi user cross-platform application that every business can make use of.

For one class of web applications, think of websites. Web software experts equip them with nice content, useful boxes and buttons, graphics, and links to make sure that they look attractive as well as become user-friendly and interactive. Web-based applications serve a good purpose in the business world. If you are looking forward to own a unique online store or manage your projects online, these applications should definitely be your consideration. Such applications are quite useful in the field of online marketing. We can see such Ecommerce websites and portals flooding the online market.

How various database design applications give easy and meaningful access to online information in different types of websites can be found by exploring educational, Ecommerce, banking, real estate, and scientific websites, and in fact many more.

The next generation of web applications, rich internet applications (RIAs), provide usability, receptiveness, and reuse of client/server applications with the operation, manageability, and accessibility of traditional web applications. RIAs are developing all types of applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, and online games. The benefit is that a surfer can connect to a website, use the software he needs, and there is no need to install anything on his own computer. These differ from other internet applications in the amount of communication interface. Through rich internet apps, one gets a superior, appealing experience that develops user satisfaction and boosts productivity, and in fact in today's scenario, a large number of companies are taking advantage of RIA technology.

Get ready to make better online venture profitability through web-based business applications designed  and developed by PLAVEB.

Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-device plug-in, is developed for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich internet applications. Microsoft should really be credited for making a very good presentation as to why Silverlight was developed and what they are expecting to achieve through it. And though Microsoft developed it, they like the idea that it work across Windows versions.

I think we are at a point of convergence where two industry trends are coming together in a way that Silverlight seems the most compelling answer for a lot of development scenarios. And the trends are a continued abstraction away from the hardware, now the operating system, and the likelihood that the web as we know now is nearing the end of its life.

The question then arises is what comes next. Do browsers become the new standards-based operating system or do we extend the runtime concept into the web as a long-term replacement?

Google, with Gears and Chrome, is betting on the former with a clear hope that the browser itself will be the next OS. Adobe is betting on the latter hoping that Flash/Flex/Air will be the runtime that makes both the browser and the OS irrelevant. Microsoft is playing smart with its Silverlight that represents a strategy very similar to Adobe's, where a runtime may well make the browser and the Windows/Mac/Linux desktop irrelevant.

Competition for Silverlight starts with WPF, but I don’t see WPF as the long-term winner. Flash/Flex/Air, other obvious competitors, however fall back in a sense that using Adobe means discarding all the .NET skills that a big community of developers have accumulated and starting all over again. The same applies to Gears.

Silverlight lets existing .NET developers, that are in abundance, leverage their existing skills. It potentially offers the power needed for smart business applications with the best deployment and navigation characteristics of the web. It’s still growing and evolving, and when HTML5 is gaining better adoption, Silverlight is going to be way ahead of where it is today.

With the customers desiring to escape from the shackles of the OS and the industry looking for the next evolutionary step in web development, Silverlight really comes out as a technology that represents the bright future of the modern web.

A full-fledged online store or with just one or two products, online packages or discounts, site membership, reviews, donation, we see Ecommerce in many forms over the internet. In short, it is an “in” thing. To bring Ecommerce viability on sites, we have an opportunity now in open source. Open source Ecommerce solutions have gained immense popularity in the recent times with them being simple, easy, accessible, and cost-effective. Today, I am going to write about a popular PHP based Ecommerce solution and that’s OpenCart. It is giving merchants an easy solution to create a lower-cost online business.

OpenCart, unlike the other existing ecommerce shopping cart systems in the market, is quite easy to follow and simple to customize. Why developers find OpenCart amazing to work with is because it has a very logical and awesomely simple MVC structure that brings subtleness to both its front-end and back-end systems.

Just have a look at the richness of features OpenCart reflects:

1. Open source and free!
2. Free online lessons to educate and a great community support
3. Unlimited category and product variety
4. Templatable with oodles of templates to choose from
5. More than 20 payment gateways to make a choice from
6. More than 8 shipping methods for the delivery of items
7. Supports multiple currencies and languages
8. Reviews and ratings for different products can be found

All in all, fast, simple, and extendible! OpenCart comes out as an ideal shopping cart system for small and medium-sized Ecommerce businesses.

Ajax is a concept that combines Asynchronous JavaScript and XML for developing highly interactive web applications. Microsoft Silverlight creates rich internet applications using XAML with the .NET framework. It can be used with the JavaScript and also work within Ajax-enabled web pages.

Let’s quickly get on to the comparison.

The Ajax side

To get the feel of Ajax, one can check its presence on Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter etc. Its implementation there has raised the bar of user satisfaction due to a rich client-end interactive experience.

With implementation of Ajax, reloading of pages is much faster without the hassle of refreshing pages and waits. Its compatibility with any browser and operating system makes it a better choice over Silverlight. The latter one still has a narrow user base.

Ajax uses JavaScript libraries like jQuery and MootTools that were one of the first technologies to help deploy sleek and interactive rich web apps. It’s good to use if you don’t want to pay for an integrated development environment (IDE) but still want an attractive and professional RIA functionality.

Ajax, no doubt, provides a good enough UI for the vast majority of cases. But, the reality is that now “pure” Ajax, i.e. just HTML and script-based, has given up to the scope of mergers for extra richness. Silverlight can be put to use to spiff it up more. Ajax applications can be made more interesting with capabilities using local storage, accessing user’s files, integrating rich media and vectors graphics, background processing etc. of plug-ins such as Silverlight and Flash. Contrastingly, the ASP.NET server controls extended to incorporate Ajax functionality can also simplify Silverlight to compensate for its shortcomings.

The Silverlight side

The first benefits with Silverlight are to the developers in coding and designing. With Silverlight development, one greatest benefit is true separation of writing business logic and designing user interface (UI). This “separation” improves a developer’s ability to decouple and isolate the visualization of elements from any necessary business logic. The improved designer/developer workflow allows the designer to work on the front-end UI while at the same time a developer can work on the backend (business logic). With Silverlight, you are most likely to benefit through decreased development time and decreased maintenance costs. For more complex scenarios such as that involving interfacing with web services, running complex logic etc., Silverlight can save tremendous development cycles.

On browser and platform reach, Silverlight can cause graceful elimination of certain nuisances with Ajax, things like XML-driven dynamic pages with validations.

If your team has primary expertise in .NET, Silverlight is a good option for custom web application development requiring complex graphics. On this note, Netflix is a credible example for Silverlight.

There is still a very significant percentage of web users who don't have Silverlight installed and who would just get away if they came to a website that relied on it. Where you're dealing with a more specialized audience or need apps for a well-known user group, say an internal app for a company like intranet, Silverlight can be reasonably trusted as a good choice as you don’t have to bother about its installation among the users.

The negative points for Silverlight at the present date are associated with its worrisome compatibility, user acceptance, and SEO. This is somewhat keeping it away from its application for Ecommerce sites or for open, public-facing applications. There, it can well be a plug-in to Ajax to be used where it makes sense or simplifies the development significantly.

Conclusion

1. Both have benefits and drawbacks as mentioned above.
2. Silverlight is easier to write, but Ajax is less frustrating. You can extend the latter with using Silverlight and add richness for the end-user.
3. There are things that can easily be done in Silverlight but not with Ajax and vice versa. One can complement the other to produce many rich apps.
4. Silverlight was released in 2008 and Ajax in 2005. With Silverlight being newer, many developers would not be at the peak of its learning curve.

Continuing with my blog series of comparing the technologies for developing rich internet applications (RIAs), today is the day for Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Again, both of these are commonly preferred client-side web development techniques that developers are nowadays using to create interactive web applications.

Microsoft Silverlight has recently entered the RIA world. On the other hand, Adobe has been in the RIA market for quite longer. Let’s quickly get started with the tug of war results:

Adobe Flex wins….

From the functionality point of view, Flex is a clear winner supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems with Silverlight not supporting Linux on any browser. Audio and video features are again richer for Adobe technologies. Flex development with its enhanced multimedia capability can provide greater user experience. Though, the latest Silverlight has added multimedia support and has some enhanced animation effects. Adobe is quite ahead in out-of-browser capabilities as it has several nice built-in advanced features like integrated browser and support for local SQLLite database with automated client/server data synchronization. Again, Silverlight has moved in this direction too with Silverlight 4 offering much tighter integration with HTML and advanced support for trusted applications.

Silverlight wins….

Silverlight wins in templating and styling. Flex styling is based on inheritance and quite commonly regarded as inflexible. Silverlight development has an ability of overriding existing template completely, which is a much powerful concept, but the price is excessive information in your XAML, not easily readable. If we consider pure computational performance, Silverlight is a clear winner. Flex does not have any built-in support for multithreading, which complicates the situation further.

Conclusion

As of now, if needing rich out-of-browser functionality or a program to be run on Linux, go for Adobe Flex. Silverlight, too, is progressing very fast and promises better integration with other Microsoft technologies. Overall, the future is bright indeed for Silverlight and Flex both as both have much ground to conquer in the continent of next generation applications.