New Website Project Sliverlight / Php

Question

Hi, Very recently i have been given a facebook like project to develop for a client of mine.

Most of the time when i comes to web development i use php since the solution PHP, apache, MySql which are all freely availble solutions, i have been thinking about using sliverlight to develop th web application, and i would like to hear some pros and cons with develping a web application in silverlight. what do you use to host the application? its costs and so on compared a LAMP solution.

Thanks, Eric.

Answer 1

Having not a clue of the type of app you're building, I need to ask: why do you think you need Silverlight? The main problem with walled-garden solutions like Flash and Silverlight is that they do not play very well with the users model of their browser. Things like bookmarks and back button tend to do the wrong thing. You can't easily navigate away and come back to what you were doing. Jeff and Joel have ranted about this in their podcasts.

Nearly everything you can imagine needing Silverlight / Flash for these days can probably be handled by a javascript/jQuery UI kit / plugin of some sort ..

Silverlight especially still has a pretty low penetration rate even with MS holding it up for you to accept during updates.

I do think there are types of applications for which these technologies make sense. Especially if they are very heavily graphically or interactively intensive. I would look at Flex sooner than Silverlight in that case.

Answer 2

I'd say the decision starts off with who needs to access this application. If it's got to run on a wide range of browsers and platforms, you're safer sticking with HTML, CSS & JavaScript as the technologies. If you're happy with PHP as the server side technology, then stick with it. You'll find the learning curve for .NET applications pretty steep.

That said, for larger projects, the slightly better practises that .NET tends to push you towards helps. Some PHP projects start small and then need to scale exposing flaws in the original architecture. The same thing obviously can happen with .NET but less so IMHO as the programmers using it tend to have slightly more disiplined training. There are of course, exceptions to all rules.

The attraction of Silverlight though is big - the ability to develop client side code in familar .NET languages and not JavaScript is appealing. Personally, the whole HTML, CSS and JavaScript (with Ajax) set-up is offensive from an asthetic point of view :-)

Rob.

PS. It will be more expensive for the development environment and back-end compared to LAMP. Only you can decide whether the investment is worthwhile.

Answer 3

Creating a website in SilverLight is as bad of an idea as using Flash:

• Users cant print

• Users can't bookmark

• Search engines can't index specific "pages"

Silverlight exists for the reason of making apps that aren't possible with traditional HTML/JS and a Facebook like app is not one of them.

Answer 4

If facebook itself uses PHP, why not develop it in PHP?