Rebooting the Web

If you're not a geek like myself, you probably haven't heard about Silverlight, Microsoft's new web technology. As both a web developer and a client developer using the .NET platform, I see the strengths and weaknesses on both sides of the thick/thin client coin. Silverlight, especially Silverlight 2.0, blurs these lines. It allows developers to write what are essentially client applications on the web. A few years ago, AJAX (using a technology created by Microsoft, and made popular by sites such as Google Maps), greatly enhanced web applications by doing away with the page refreshes between mouse clicks. This allowed developers to create a new generation of web applications that behaved more like client applications. This revolution was called Web 2.0. It was a great improvement, however web applications were still handicapped by the visual confines of HTML and the browser. Of course, a compelling user experience could still be created with Flash, but that meant that the Flash content would not be indexed by a search engine. Silverlight is the next evolution of the web. As Jeff Prosise put it last year, Microsoft "rebooted the web" by giving developers a declarative programming model using XML (XAML), that allows for the creation of Flash-like user interfaces that can also be indexed be search engines (not to mention it has killer performance). In the past year since the announcement of Silverlight (formerly WPF/E), there have been some great ideas developed around it. Most early adopters used Silverlight simply for streaming HD-video, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Check out the Silverlight Showcase to see what is possible with Silverlight 1.0. Silverlight 2.0, currently in Beta 1, expands on the Silverlight model by including a version of the .NET platform to write code against. This opens the door for .NET developers who have never touched Flash to write applications on the web that provide experiences that users never thought possible on the web. It will be interesting to see how quickly this technology (or alternatively, Flex, but I'm rooting for Silverlight) is adopted and how the web will be transformed. It is an exciting time to be a web developer.