What now for silverlight as a RIA frontend

Posted by jmls on 29-Oct-2010 17:48

from this post:

http://www.osnews.com/story/23966/Microsoft_Changes_Silverlight_Strategy_Focuses_on_HTML5

" Microsoft is betting big on HTML5 instead, turning Silverlight into the development platform for Windows Phone, and that's it. So... Silverlight is dead - long live Silerlight?"

All Replies

Posted by Tim Kuehn on 30-Oct-2010 18:28

Why does this not surprise me?

Posted by Admin on 31-Oct-2010 00:38

Why does this not surprise me?

The question is if Progress' was expecting that shift (if it's an official shift and not just a rumor with nothing behind it).

A couple of weeks back, Gus mentioned on peg a "RIA adapter for Microsoft's Silverlight" for OpenEdge 11. What's Progress view on that now?

Posted by Tim Kuehn on 01-Nov-2010 07:24

I imagine it's "!#@#$%#$" M$!

Posted by Shelley Chase on 01-Nov-2010 08:09

This is an unexpected shift from our point of view. We certainly knew about the Windows Phone OS support for Silverlight. But there is a lot of traction behind Silverlight and there are many projects underway by both OpenEdge customers and Microsoft customers with Silverlight. We are still committed to a Silverlight adapter for OE 11 and are starting a "Proof of Concept" shortly. Of course we will follow Microsoft's comments on Silverlight very closely and continue to evaluate our RIA direction.

If you have any comments/suggestions, please let me know.

-Shelley

Posted by jmls on 01-Nov-2010 09:11

Hi Shelly,

My initial comment would be that if a huge amount of platforms support html5 and Google seems to be heading that way (andorid, chromeOS etc) and that there are a number of IDE and platforms around that support html5 (iUIiWebKit  JQTouch, Sencha Touch, etc) would it not be better to see if html5 was a better bet than SilverLight ?

Julian

Posted by dhubbuck on 01-Nov-2010 17:01
Posted by jmls on 02-Nov-2010 06:22

I don't know - from the tone and comments in this article, it seems pretty sure where they are heading:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/01/muglia_silverlight_future/

Quote "Both Muglia and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer - speaking at last week's Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) - have made it clear: HTML5 is now considered the future for building rich interfaces for web-connected devices."

Posted by Marko Myllymäki on 09-Nov-2010 03:56

@Shelley: I hope that you still stick to the plan to provide a Silverlight adapter. I find it hard to believe that html 5 could be as productive and usable for business applications as Silverlight is, even in a few years time frame. WCF RIA Services is a very interesting pattern and if Progress AppServer is integrated with that, we could have a very nice framework for RIA.

Marko

Posted by gus on 12-Nov-2010 12:48

And I spoke about it again when I was in Australia recently.

IMHO, there is currently no reason for us to change course. We decided to do the Silverlight adapter because customers were interesed in having it. As far as I know, they still are.

Posted by davidkerkhofs3 on 30-Nov-2010 03:27

I would say that MS is planning a charm offensive (one it needs IMHO):

http://team.silverlight.net/tags/firestarter/

Posted by jmls on 13-Jun-2011 00:18

Now it seems as if html5 is going to be used for windows 8 development as well

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/06/html5-centric-windows-8-leaves-microsoft-developers-horrified.ars

Posted by jmls on 23-Jun-2011 15:01

another interesting nugget in respect of windows 8

http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/06/23/porting-node-to-windows-with-microsoft%E2%80%99s-help/

MS are helping port node.js (http://www.nodejs.org/) to windows as a native .exe

seems like they are really going to be using Javascript big time, for front end (windows 8) and backend (node.js)

Posted by jmls on 15-Sep-2011 14:21

Ouch. It's official. Silverlight / Flash are not supported in the windows 8 metro IE 10 browser.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/14/metro-style-browsing-and-plug-in-free-html5.aspx

Posted by Onetime on 21-Sep-2011 09:39

IE10 will continue to run silverlight (and other plugins) in desktop mode. Plus you can also run silverlight OOB.

Metro is about more than "browser" though ... so if win8 & metro is your concern there are bigger issues in your path.

Microsoft have also announced that WinRT is the direction forward, and hence the focus on a declarative framework. Silverlight will morph into this model, and some of the toolset for doing this (and thus running in the non-plugin IE10 mode) is already in pre-release - and shown at recent events, although it doesnt make a great press release

This thread is closed