Image via WikipediaMillion dollar question. Can Silverlight raise to the glory of Flash and eventually surpass it?
As a person incharge of recommending technology to clients, it's been a tough time making a case to build websites using Silverlight. Primarily being a new technology, there are certainly questions about investing those dollars. Whether to build using ubiqutous Flash or the new comer Silverlight remains the big question. I have been following the debates on Silverlight vs Flash to help make decisions on technology for Web 3.0, which is of course RIA. Prospects, Risks and Speculations from my understanding for the curious:
Silverlight doesn't have any great showcases for technology adoption except NBC Olympics and Net Flix live streaming. Ironically, these two demostrate the streaming capability and not the power of Silverlight (maybe, this is the best MS could do at this point of time). RIA has played the role delivering media, rich user experience and ease of use. But, not to a great extent on Enterprise applications front. Leaving aside the question, whether RIA is ready for Enterprise, how can Flex and Silverlight fair in Enterprise setup. MS does have a strong position with a well entrenched Enterprise software market such as SharePoint and all-popular .NET platform. Since, Silverlight is tied to .NET, Silverlight is obviously well tied to Enterprise. Silverlight already connects or integrates with SharePoint, making it easy to RIA enable existing SharePoint Enterprise infrastructure.
The biggest selling point of MS has always been its clout over the Enterprise market with its interconnected software spread all over the Enterprise. It makes to easier to add something that extends the existing infrastructure rather than build the entire infrastructure from scratch. Hold on. In what way is this argument connected to Silverlight? You may ask. Transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 resulted in upgrading apps(including Enterprise) from simple always-post-back web pages to interactive AJAX. With Web 3.0 on the horizon, RIA is the much anticipated replacement/upgrade for AJAX(don't know how google is going to manage the tide). There comes the Silverlight. MS will obviously push Silverlight into every single product you can imagine from mobile, desktop, servers to Web Office on the software services side. By moving to RIA, MS will be in a better position to tackle Google with much richer and intuitive web apps. MS couldn't crack the AJAX the way Google did. So, Silverlight is going to be their best bet.
With all those reasoning, i am bound to believe that Silverlight will become as ubiqutous as Windows, .NET etc.
Couple of interesting points from web(references at the end):
"In Silverlight 2 we have integration with SharePoint 2007 and Microsoft's Azure Cloud Platform. What is Adobe going to integrate with beyond PhotoShop??? In the works we have Reporting Services 2008 R2 integration (think Business Objects XCelcius dashboards). The Office Web will be powered by Silverlight 3. Where is Adobe's suite?Silverlight is going to be on mobile devices: Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian. Does Adobe have a mobile OS? Next version of VS 2010 integration enterprise services and workflows (WCF/WF) all under a SINGLE environment. Does Adobe have something similar? (not counting shelling out extra for 3rd party add-ons). Silverlight is getting F# a multi-threaded/statistical language...pick your choice how you want to code in Silverlight 3 first class languages plus dynamic ones. Flash/Flex needs to support true multithreading first before we can talk :)"
Read the complete thread here for an exhaustive technical debate.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8f488c36-d38d-49a1-9d08-ae2a077abf9e)
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