What would be the best suited language/technology in this scenario?

Question

I'm about to develop a small system to display dynamic information in public spaces across an entire building (similar to Flight Information Displays on an Airport).

The system will have two main components:

• a back-office for managing the information displayed
• a front-end which acctually displays the information.

The back-office component is covered: it's a simple crud application with a web interface, accessed through the intranet.

I have to decide which language/technology to use for the front-end. The purpose of this component is only to access the information in stored in the back-office and display it in a big LCD monitor. No input in expected, just display the information, paging once in a while as all the information won't fit in the screen at once.

I think of a Flash movie which some-how access the back-office data through the local intranet to get the information to display.

Can you think of a better option for the front-end? Why?

Other technologies that came across my mind are:

• Silverlight
• Flex
• JavaFX

Answer 1

I've had pretty good success using Silverlight and C# to access and display back-end data, running it in out-of-browser mode to avoid the display of browser chrome. WPF might also work in your situation instead of Silverlight, but Silverlight seems to be the target for most of Microsoft's recent tooling efforts (via WCF RIA Services).

The advantages for me were the fact that my company largely already has a Microsoft-based infrastructure and we already owned the tools. Up-front costs can be an issue if you go the Redmond Way. Also Silverlight and WPF have fairly healthy learning curves, though there are tons of resources and tutorials available.