Saturday, February 20, 2010

Silverlight 4... JQuery and WOA... Oh My!

.. I got very very busy. But I did get a chance to build a few small application in Silverlight 4. Nothing ground breaking really so don't get excited.

Initial thoughts:
  • VS2010 is hot. I mean, it makes other IDE's look Neolithic.
  • Silverlight smells like Flex.
  • Silverlight + Expression Blend is neat, but they don't 'blend' together as nicely as you'd want.
Some further thoughts.

Web Oriented Architect

With the increase choice of JQuery or other JS frameworks (plus AJAX suuport of course) the WOA model seems to be growing in popularity. I know it's cool and has its place - but it is by no means following a KISS (keeping it simple silly) model. If you are building a web application and most of the RIA features from Silverlight and Flex are not necessary, I ask you: Does it make sense to go with a WOA: RESTful services + application server + web server + JS library/Flex/Silverlight?. Personally, I'm just not sure yet. What happened to the days of strong caching models and sleak simple non-WEB services oriented architectures with CSS/HTML/DHTML and light AJAX models?

1 comment:

  1. I'm also in favour of a simpler, services-based architecture with a lighter front-end; you can still get RIA with HTML5/CSS3. Though I can't speak as well for Silverlight, I've done a lot of Flex and I find it's very common to end up with almost a full MVC on your front-end. This is fine if you legitimately need it (and sometimes you do) but it's an expensive choice in terms of complexity.

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