Over a period of time, web applications/technologies evolved through various phases like CGI, Perl, Java, ASP, ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and now Silverlight. Silverlight is nothing but a web presentation technology which is created to run on separate platforms. So far a great barrier to web applications was user experience. Because of technical constraints, the same user experience of thick client cannot be delivered to web users. It allows us to create rich and interactive experiences which can run on different browsers, different devices and different desktop operating systems as well.
So, what is the foundation of Silverlight technology? The main foundation is XAML i.e. eXtensible Application Markup Language. It is basically XML, which is text-based, providing a firewall-friendly, easy-to-inspect description of the rich contents. Other technologies like Flash, ActiveX or Applets send binary stream to the browser. This is diffcult to audit from security perspective as well as difficult to update. To know more about the architecture of the Silverlight, let us look at the building blocks of it as given below:
• Light-weight browser plug-in:
It has Windows and Macintosh modules designed to enhance Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari browsers.
• Native Presentation runtime:
Software based browser enhancements allowing rendering of XAML based media in addition to the browser based native rendering of HTML. XAML can be used inline, in a file or in a package.
• Media Pipeline:
Video and audio are handled as media elements in the XAML.
• XAML Parser
Parser is used to parse the XAML before rendering it.
• Programming layer
Silverlight XAML is exposed as DOM model to Javascript. It also supports managed code programming model using the subset of CLR
Should you want more information on this, you can refer to the following URL:
http://silverlight.net/
Cheers,
Amol
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