Hiris Technologies Blog

Silverlight is a browser plug-in that that extends the web development experience far beyond the limitations of plain HTML and JavaScript. Being a Microsoft product, you might expect it to work best (or only) on Windows and Internet Explorer. So you may be pleasantly surprised to know that it works equally well on Windows and on the Mac, and it also works equally well on the Firefox and Safari web browsers. Since Silverlight is a client side technology, it doesn’t matter what backend server software or platform you’re running - even Apache/Linux will do just fine.

Features of Silverlight:

• Incorporates Windows Presentation Foundation Core
• Contains CLR (Common Language Runtime) and most important base classes from the .NET Framework
• Supports programming in C#, VB, JScript, Ruby, Python
• Embeds Communication Framework including WCF (Windows Communication Framework)
  Comes with Data Framework including LINQ

The Internet is undergoing an extreme makeover. In the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century, the World Wide Web was primarily a place for viewers to retrieve information. The information flowed in a one-way direction. Websites were mostly built by “techie” folk who knew complex HTML coding and FTP site management. If you’re scratching your head, you’re not alone.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform

Web as Platform, Harnessing Collective Intelligence, Data as the Intel Inside, End of the Software Release Cycle, Lightweight Programming Models, Software Above the Level of a Single Device, and Rich User Experiences.

The difference between current 1.0.12 and the forthcoming 1.5 Beta-2 are not easy to describe, but in essence Joomla! 1.0.x was based upon the Mambo codebase, whereas Joomla! 1.5 has been completely rewritten from scratch. Joomla! 1.0.x was written with “freedom of use” in mind; with Joomla! 1.5 expanded on this and added “ease of use”. This all sounds very nice, but what does it mean? Freedom of use refers to the unlimited possibilities you have when building web-sites, and with ease of use have tried to make life simpler for the end user, the web administrator and of course the third party developers.

Future Prospects:

Very bright future for joomla 1.5. It will take while for developers to update their products and take full advantage of 1.5’s new features, but by choosing 1.5 you will have an easy upgrade path to future versions.

Components:

All the available components are compatible with the joomla 1.0.12 version. Developers are developing more extensions now that are supported by 1.5 version.
Some components of 1.0 can also be run with joomla 1.5 in legacy mode.

Templates:

No commercial and only a few free templates have been released in joomla 1.5. But in 1.0.12 version, you can find free and commercial web templates.

Why should I choose this(1.0 or 1.5) version?

If time is not on your side, go with 1.0.12. Also, if you have a small site, the migration to 1.5 should be relatively painless.
If your project is not urgent, or if you’re building a large, fully-featured site, its well-worth waiting the extra time to take advantage of 1.5’s increased potential.

Secure:

Version 1.5 is more secure and has a nicer and more organized backend

“If you are building a new site and don’t have many extensions, make sure it will be future proof and use Joomla 1.5.”

When should AJAX be used?

• Form driven interaction

Use it when there is need to edit the field and submit action.

• Deep hierarchical tree navigation

Multiple levels of hierarchy by navigation.

• Rapid user-user communication

Can be used in message posting application, that creates immediate discussions between people. For example, gmail inbox

• Voting, Yes/No boxes, Ratings submissions.

In places where people can vote/rate an article.

• Filtering and involved data manipulation.

Sorting the fields by date and name, applying a filter.

• Commonly entered text hints / autocompletion.

When entering the same text phrases or predictable text phrases. For example, in gmail for adding the email addresses. Can be used to suggest the text phrases while entering the text in a text box. For example, google autosuggest search.

Content Management System software is available commercially from several vendors, as well as from many free or open source software (FOSS) communities.

Open source has the additional benefit of an collaborative community of programmers working on improvements and bug fixes, often able to respond faster than their commercial rivals. Of course, cost is the advantage many IT managers are interested in when considering open source alternatives, as most of these packages are available free or for a small donation of time or money.

In either case, using a CMS solution, whether commerical or FOSS, saves money in development time and also provides stronger security through the technical support of the software vendor or the collaborative programming community.

SL does not require video codec to run industry standard videos like .WMV
But Flash requires video codec to run .WMV videos. Flash has also limitation to play other video file.

SL supports Scalable full screen video.
Flash does not support Scalable full screen video.

SL supports the WPF animation model, which is time based instead of frame based.
The animation model is frame based in Flash.