Silverlight in Enterprise Application

Silverlight:

                 Silverlight is a RIA (Rich Internet Application) technology by Microsoft is a well competitor to Flash (who is a market leader for long time and having 80% market share). Flash is used by all the web sites which needs more rich user interface. But the enterprise web applications are only using the Flash in rare occasions.

                 Microsoft announced the silverlight for both web sites and enterprise web applications, specifically they also came with some specific stuff like RIA Services for the business applications.

Enterprise Applications with Silverlight:

                 The enterprise applications which are already available are mostly trying to use silverlight as part of their applications which pages are having the UI issues and the pages which needs more rich user content. So here the integration of Silverlight as part of the application is very important concept and not making the silverlight as the default for the entire application. The enterprise applications which are going to be created from scratch using silverlight is having some security threats.

Advantages:

                 1. The silverlight applications are helping to avoid the page postbacks.

                 2. The data which is transfered during the running of the application with silverlight only downloads the service output data not the rendered page content as like in ASP.NET.

                 3. The response time of the page is reduced because of minimal data transfer between server and the client. (will reduce the bandwith also)

                 4. The better user interface and the event handling mechanism helps to improve the user satisfaction.

Issues need to be sorted out:

                 1. Usage of silverlight control as part of the ASP.NET application - The silverlight control can't be used as a user control in a asp.net application because passing of data to the control is not possible from the code behind file.

                 2.  Security: The security of the downloaded xap content is the first issue. We can avoid the readability of the xap using obfuscator, but still it is not 100% fool proof.

                 3.  Size of the XAP: The size of the xap is more then the first time page rendering will take more time. But we can avoid it by dynamically loading the xap during the run time.

                 4.  Proxy: If the service is refered in the xap file, then the proxy size need to be considered. The proxy will also give the business structure to the client system will be a threat to our UI and Business models in the xap.

In the next post I will add some more tips about Usage of Silverlight in .net...