What do you suggest for creating data intensive web applications? Silverlight or ASP.net?

Question

What do you suggest for creating data intensive web applications? Silverlight or ASP.net?

(data intensive applications like asset management system or warehouse management system)

Can you tell me your reasons ?

Thank you in advance ;-)

Answer 1

If you do have the choice of either of the two, I would probably use Silverlight.

Why? The Silverlight UI presented to the user is much richer - a large subset of WPF - and thus you can do a lot more in Silverlight like client-side validation (much easier than in ASP.NET), much richer UI elements, and more.

Also, in my opinion, using Silverlight to asynchronously get and save data over WCF services promotes a much better separation of concerns and much cleaner architecture in the end. In Silverlight, you don't have to deal with the intricasies of ASP.NET page lifecycle, postbacks, viewstate and more of those thorny issues that makes serious ASP.NET much harder than it would first appear after a few "Hello World" demos...

With Silverlight, you'll still have server-side components - the data needs to be provided and stored by a backend, a WCF service.

Marc

Answer 2

You will probably depend to a great extent on good third-party controls for such projects, especially a good data grid control. A range of controls are available for both ASP.NET and Silverlight, though the selection for ASP.NET is obviously better at the moment. I'd recommend evaluating a range of control suites for both platforms as you might end up choosing the platform based on which controls you find most suitable.