Switching to silverlight for enterprise application ?

Question

After 9 month developing an enterprise application using MVC + JQuery our Management and stockholders interesting to convert and switch to silverlight! they think it's more powerful than Ajax, make development speed faster than our current solution, It's Windows and Web and less headache.

Unfortunately, our stockholders dos not know anything about web and stateless state of web application and they always compare with window applications.

But nobody in our team know anything about silverlight. I am not sure that is a good decision. I think we develop as fast as possible. we develop a great framework and code generator for fast develop.

Thanks and sorry for bad English.

Answer 1

Dumping what you have and going for a rebuild mid development is almost always a bad idea.

For a personal project, I did exactly this. It was originally built during the betas of asp.net MVC. I got the app to a stage where it was usable (actually I still use it daily), but it was nowhere near ready for the outside world. And this was the problem; it was going to take an enormous amount of work so that other people could use it...

When Silverlight 3 was announced, I literally grabbed the backend of the app - stuck RIA services in between and had a few screens up and running that day without any prior SL knowledge. I probably could have kept going down this path but something clicked when I started to realise the power of silverlight. The goal posts for my app moved, and I began a SL specific rewrite.

Since then, I've started re-writing about 5 times over. I guess I'm still just learning how to best build an app in SL, having spent the last 12 years or so of my career working on stateless web apps, there was a big mental shift involved.

I'm a much better web developer then I am a silverlight developer, but if it was for a real project (rather then a pet side project) - it would have been shipped and out the door by now.

I'm convinced that SL is the ideal platform for most web applications (as long as it being a plugin isn't going to be any issue).

With that said, shipping is still the most important thing. SL is great, but the learning curve is steep. If you guys are anywhere near completing the app, I'd insist you forge on with mvc and maybe get someone to build a SL branch.

Answer 2

Re-platform an application is always costly, although if you've got your MVC right it should theoretically be easier to replace the "VIEW" part of the application with something else.

As to whether Silverlight offers you more than HTML / JavaScript is down to what you're using it for. If what you are doing is media-related or highly graphical, Silverlight might be a good choice. If your application is like most business apps (i.e. some input fields backed by some read / write to database) Silverlight doesn't really offer any tangible time saving for this kind of operation.

If the web application is public and you care about search engine indexing, semantic HTML offers the best possible option.