Poll: What do you think of Microsoft Silverlight?
As noted in our coverage of Ray Ozzie's MIX keynote this morning, Microsoft has released a number of significant upgrades to its Silverlight product. Silverlight is essentially a competitor to Adobe's Flash, in that enables developers to create interactive web apps. It's officially described as "a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web." Ryan Stewart's definition puts it in context of Microsoft's other dev platforms:
"You can build desktop applications with Windows Presentation Foundation, build web-only applications with ASP.NET AJAX and now the hybrid Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight."
The enhancements announced today for Silverlight include integration with .NET and support for dynamic languages - including Python and Ruby. Microsoft also announced new tool support for building Silverlight applications, with Expression Studio and the next edition of Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas".
Tell us what you think of the new-look Silverlight in this week's poll, below.
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I don't see Silverlight as a competitor to Apollo, as much as it is a competitor to the Flash player.
Apollo is a desktop runtime. Silverlight is a browser plugin.
mike chambers
mesh@adobe.com
Silverlight looked incredible before today's announcements, and now with .NET support the feature set seems very complete, and very compelling. It's not just about what a technology can do, but how easily one can make it work! With Visual Studio support, developers will eat this up. Plus, Expression seems to be a much needed integrator between designers and developers that just hasn't existed for any before in any previous technologies.
Can't wait to see all the sweet apps that come from Silverlight in the next couple of years.
Thanks for the clarification Mike, I amended that part of the post.
I think silverlight(aka silver bullet) has to play catchup for a while as currently it does not even run on some flavors of windows without the right installs... let alone other OS platforms.
I hope MSFT can get this right ...
I am very reluctant of MS's claims of cross-anything. Standards compliance has never been their forte. IE has created many problems and few solutions. Perhaps this will be their breakout product.
The future will be built around REST architectures...
- RESTful Web Services: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/index.html
- Microsoft Codename "Astoria": http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/
- Google: http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2007/04/recapping-atom-publishing-protocol.html
REST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
VM,
What flavors of Windows are you talking about?
I too am reluctant of the cross-platform promises...I've heard it before.
However it really seems like Microsoft is taking their time and doing this right before bringing to market.
They need to go light on the installs and they have a long way to go before they catch up with the traction of Flash / Flex / APOLLO.
Interesting race though!
when MS is heading one way - all the web goes this way!
They will integrate Silverlight into Visual Stuio, making it easy for milions developers to work it our easily.
Just seen few demos and its really something!
Eh? Can anyone spell "Anti-Trust?"
Meh!
Before I state my opinion, you should know TeamDirection (my company) produces desktop applications for the Windows environment. At this point we are pretty much a 100% .NET shop. As a result, I find the announcement that .NET will plug in to Silverlight very interesting.
We have also been looking at Adobe Apollo, but quite honestly, cross-platform ability is *not* the highest priority. Rather, as I've mentioned before in my posts, ease of installation is.
If .NET plugs right in to Silverlight, and you gain the benefits of native hardware acceleration, then I would be quite happy writing to .NET and taking advantage of Silverlight.
Having the option of deploying traditional rich clients or hybrid rich clients with Silverlight is great. Because of the huge Windows base, we will be evaluating Silverlight and Apollo more on the basis of performance and ease of use than anything else.
That said, I've heard many great things about Apollo as well, especially the performance they have been able to produce. In fact, if I may be so bold (and when am I not :), I think Apple and Adobe should team up (like they used to) and really nail the solution for the Mac platform. We are seeing an increase in demand for the Mac, but I just need to see a few more points of market share before I can commit resources.
My $.02
Silverlight for creating .Net app is really cool!
Keep watching MS for the next few months, we may have some real surprises on our way.
The new trend of releasing silverlight 1.1 alpha and Silverlight 1.0 beta released at the same time is a bummer!