During the last couple of months, I’ve been doing some presentations on Silverlight and SharePoint integration. During my presentations, I always try to explain some RIA concepts first so everybody can understand why there is some much buzz about it. But at the same time when I start talking about the subject, I see some people really underestimating it (I’ve seen even people laughing about it). In my opinion when people do not understand something or do not have a clear knowledge about something, they will always try to undervalue it.
I believe that a big reason for that is a misconception that most people still have around Silverlight. Most people still think that Silverlight is only a plug-in for creating fancy graphics or display videos.
What I try to demonstrate is that Silverlight is much more than this, and that’s why it’s not only a fad. Actually It’s here to stay and will be the next standard for web applications. In my opinion, a big reason for a technology to survive is to provide a good business model that not only provide nice features, but it can save or bring more money to the company.
And Silverlight is a technology that can provide a shift in the web business model. A big paradigm change is related to a new processing model, from a Server centric model to a Client centric one. Take a look at the image below for a Server Centric model. In this model a lot of the server load is related to the server-side controls that need to be translated into HTML. Since in this model the browser on the client side only “understands” HTML, CSS and Javascript, it cannot understand a “server control”, such as a Label or a Datagrid. So the server has to create the equivalent in HTML to represent these controls. This is a huge task and consumes a lot of CPU cycles in the long run. With the introduction of Ajax, this changed a little bit, since the out of band calls the server could process only data going back and forth instead a full page request, but still the server controls exist.
In a Client centric scenario, there is a big change in the processing model. In this model, most of the server load is related to processing “data requests”. Using Silverlight for example, the first time a browser make a request to the server, it will download a .xap file but that’s just once. After that the client running on top of the Silverlight engine will only need to make data requests to the server. This will translate into a server more responsive with a better performance, and consequently more bang for your buck.
Of course this is not the only reason for it to succeed but it really adds up to the other reasons (will talk about them in the future).
I think that with so many companies moving to a Cloud computing model, this technology will be one of the enablers to make cloud computing on the server side to really happen. On the client side Silverlight will drive the SAAS model.
Again, look at Silverlight through a different point of view other than a developer’s or designer one. I guess that once CIO’s, CTO’s and business decision makers start paying attention and start viewing this technology on this angle, things will definitely change.
AN.
