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.

Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft Silverlight both can be used to develop rich internet applications based on XAML and .NET Framework. However, depending upon how you want your project to shape up, you need to choose between the two or integrate them.

An overview

WPF has provided developers a unified programming model that has a new graphical user interface (GUI) framework replacing the old “Windows Forms” and Win32 API. Its vector based and graphics processing unit (GPU) enabled drawing framework (DirectX) has the ability to create richer UIs with media and documents than does the Windows Forms. Using a declarative-based language XAML specifying vector-based graphics able to scale and take advantage of hardware acceleration, WPF can render a new level of user experience. One gets a consistent programming model for application building with a clear separation between the business logic and the user interface.

Microsoft Silverlight, a cross-browser and cross-platform implementation of the .NET Framework, is a small and lightweight hosting technology delivering next-gen rich interactive media and content over the web and developing browser-hosted rich internet applications (RIAs) that could integrate data and services from several sources. It also builds applications enhancing the typical end-user experience fairly significantly if you compare them with the traditional web applications.

How they differ

While WPF leverages the full .NET Framework and executes on the common language runtime (CLR), Silverlight is based only on a subset of XAML and the full .NET Framework executing on a browser-hosted version of the CLR. Hence, a lot of basic approaches building WPF applications fail in Silverlight. It supports little of the WPF component primitives and provides only one type of layout. So, if an existing WPF application is to be ported to Silverlight, it would mean rewriting of the whole UI-related code.

WPF applications run as standalone desktop programs or can be hosted in a website as an embedded object (on Windows only). However, browsers-based WPF applications (running only on Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows) lose access to some functions and that does not happen with desktop applications. On the contrary, deployment of Silverlight applications can be done on more platforms (Windows, OS X, and Linux) and more browsers. Small and lightweight applications, they consume less infrastructure.

Conclusion

Though built on peaks of different run-time stacks, WPF and Silverlight share many common capabilities and features. Silverlight embeds WPF to provide web controls with more focus on a UI object model and less on animation. Alone, it misses many 3D functions and lacks widgets. Out of many such missing elements in Silverlight is the GUI. Many missing WPF and .NET Framework features in Silverlight give rise to subtle differences that have to be carefully considered when moving an application between Silverlight and WPF or when building an application that targets both WPF and Silverlight.

Web development would make sense to many if I say that it is web designing, database management, content management, client-server communication, hardware and software configuration, or in other words if I say it is developing applications to communicate over some form of network that may be accessed by some client device, i.e., a web browser, a mobile device etc.

Let’s understand where do Silverlight and Flash stand in web development, how are they characterized, and how do they compete.

Position

Client-side web development skills can make use of the following set of technologies. The list includes only the most common technologies in use.

•     HTML/XHTML/XML
•     Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
•     JavaScript
•     Ajax
•     Flash/Flex
•     Microsoft Silverlight

Characterization

Silverlight was released by Microsoft in October of 2008 as a free runtime programmable web browser plug-in using the .NET framework that could power Rich Internet Application experiences and deliver high-quality, interactive video across multiple platforms and browsers. It uses XAML (text based) with a simple XML object able to output it. Its rich internet application enabling features include vector graphics, animation, and audio/video playback.

Flash was introduced in 1996. Originally acquired by Macromedia, currently it is owned by Adobe Systems. It is a frequently used multimedia platform for ads and games and more recently has been positioned as a RIA tool. Containing an object-oriented language called ActionScript, it has a control over vector and raster graphics that empower it for animation of the text, drawings, and static images. It supports bidirectional streaming of audio and video.

ActionScript, coming from the early days of DOS, would mean adopting an imperative approach, while XAML is a rather declarative approach.

Competition

Let’s start with Silverlight. What all it offers! Silverlight supports animation through a time based model and not a frame-based. Known as WPF animation model, it has entirely eliminated matrixes. The system figures out the function just with the defined start and end conditions. It supports JavaScript, VB.NET, and C# programming languages and has an exclusive support for popular JPG and PNG formats. It allows the use of true type fonts directly. From a debugging point of view, it is relatively much more easy and versatile than Flash.

Setbacks: Can’t work on Linux. Missing features like buttons and grids affect functionality for some of the tasks. Socket programming and sound processing unavailable, useless for websites like YouTube.

On the other hand, Flash can work on Linux, and that’s a very important feature. It contains certain useful features that are missing in Silverlight such as buttons, list buttons, list views, checkboxes, and grids. It supports GIF and BMP formats.

Setbacks: Inability to work with .avi and.mov files and also to bind to models or connect to the network and obtain data.

Though not yet as prevalent as Flash, Silverlight definitely has emerged as a powerful cross browser and cross-platform browser plug-in able to design, develop, and deliver complex applications for companies on the World Wide Web. It also allows for rapid development. Its growing popularity can be measured by the fact that it has been used for video streaming in many high-profile events such as 2008 Summer Olympics and 2010 Winter Olympics.

Web application development gradually headed towards customization as the needs of the end-users and web owners started bespeaking their specific requirements. Professionals across all industries are falling in love with custom web applications. Call it 'custom software development' or 'custom web application development,' these applications are serving various industries like IT, retail, education, healthcare, banking and finance right away!

With a customized web application, your specific process is executed in a systematic step-by-step manner making your work smooth and easy. Technologically advanced softwares possessing unique features cater to your business-specific needs. These applications are open to new enhancements and thus can be made better to fit well the future environment. You typically get more quickness, user-friendliness, presentability, and functionality. You exactly know why it is made and how it works. And that’s the way it should be as one would just want to add simplicity, easy maintenance, and efficiency for any operation driving his business. Your choice of software further streamlines your business and you are not spending that liberally as no junk feature is to be paid for.

Not only that web surfing and browsing has become much easier, but data management and content management problem has also got a solution through custom web development. Various open source technologies like JavaScript, ASP/ASP.Net, PHP, MySQL can be used to successfully build custom web applications. What should be used depends on a user’s requirements, like there’s a difference in Ecommerce and banking applications.

By way of custom softwares, online business owners and institutions are getting a way to manage the information and work processes in a much faster and efficient manner. Whether an individual need or a business need of productivity to meet the industrial standards, custom web application development is converting ideas into a practical reality.