The Flash vs Silverlight debate has been on for a while now. And of course, there is much to be said for both sides. However, those who do choose to work with a young platform like Silverlight in spite of Flash being the dominant industry platform definitely have some good reasons to do so.

There is no denying that Adobe Flash is a mature product that has been around for more than a decade now, but Silverlight manages to hold its own even in the face of such tough competition. Of late, Silverlight has emerged as a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and a variety of business applications for the Web, desktop, and even mobile devices. Some of the most important factors that make Silverlight an amazing web application framework are as follows:

• While the Flash format has no option of animation other than transformation matrices, Silverlight supports the WPF animation model. This is not only time based (unlike Flash, which is frame based) – but also allows you define the start and end conditions and helps you get there.
• Secondly, while Flash stores its shapes using binary shape records, Silverlight on the other hand uses XAML. As XAML is text based and can be output using a simple XML object, it emerges to be more user-friendly and effective. You do not need to buy special libraries for writing files – all you need to do is stream some text to a particular file and you’re nicely done.
• Thirdly, though Flash supports multiple video formats, you need to know that the original video codec is actually a mutant version of the Sorenson’s proprietary H.263. But, Silverlight can implement industry standard VC-1 codec for videos, as well as offers support for WMV and WMA.

For someone who has been working with Flash on an ongoing basis, the latest versions of Silverlight would definitely be pretty amazing. And developers can only be happy now that they have competing platforms with different strengths to work with!

I would like to keep our customers, partners and all well-wishers informed on what we are up to and what we observe as the most promising trends and updates in the technology world. If this is of interest to you, I would love to hear your comments.

#1 Mobility: This should come as no surprise. The daily M&A news around mobility is shouting loud and clear that every technology company wants mobile as a component of their product strategy. From SAP’s acquisition of Sybase and Google’s acquisition of AdMob to Twitter’s acquisition of mobile clients – it’s a frenzy as never seen before. Eric Schmidt famously announced at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona that Google now has a “mobility first” corporate strategy. Everything that it does will be first done for mobile devices and then for the Web. Steve Jobs declared that as Apple gets on a run rate of $50 billion a year in sales, it is now essentially a mobile devices company.

In a recent survey it was discovered that most people would feel more nervous if they left home in the morning without a cell phone than if they left without their wallet. Over 30% said the last thing they did before going to sleep was to check their messages on their cell phones and the first thing they did on waking up was check their phone for messages. (SMS, voice mail and social messages on Facebook or Twitter.)

Mobility is Trend #1

#2 Open Source: At a recent conference on Drupal (DrupalCon, San Francisco) where Web Spiders was a sponsor, it was heartening to see how open source worked. We met the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert, at the conference (twitter.com/dries). Also, the core group of maintainers was present, and there was a lot of conversation about Drupal 7. As many of you know, there is no single company working on the growth of Drupal. It is led by volunteers and managed by the maintainers. None of these people are paid by anyone. Still the platform has become so strong that even the White House official Website is now on Drupal. Interestingly, Microsoft was present in a big way and is now actively supporting PHP and Drupal for its IIS Web Server. See: http://blogs.webspiders.com/index.php/new-sql-server-driver-for-php-from-microsoft.

In UK, it has been made compulsory for government bodies to include open source as an option in their RFPs. Some of the best innovation in the market today is open source like Android, Firefox, Chrome, Drupal CMS and hundreds of other software components. These are routinely used by technology companies who include them as building blocks of their products. Open source is not new, but the year 2010 is seeing the maturity and acceptance of open source – from the Fortune 500 companies to the White House.

Open Source is Trend #2

#3 Enterprise Social Media: Sorry for pointing out the obvious, but what we see today is Enterprise adoption of Social Media. Many have famously scoffed at Twitter and Facebook and alluded to their lack of real benefits in the enterprise world. The year 2010 is seeing a turnaround of that thought process.

The Websites of most major corporations today carry links to their Twitter and Facebook profiles. Twitter has become the de facto standard to announce and share news, updates and links. Many use Twitter and Facebook stream as an RSS reader. ALL news sites publish to social media. This trend is nothing short of being revolutionary. The digital marketing domain is evolving from Search Engine Optimization to Social Media Optimization. Moving on from using Social Media for marketing, many corporations are using private social media platforms to create a social private graph within their firewalls for internal communication. MS Office 2010 has social connectors in Outlook and most technology companies today now provide integration of their products into popular social platforms.

Enterprise Social Media is Trend #3 and is here to stay

Siddharth Jhunjhunwala

CEO, Web Spiders Group

linkedin.com/in/webspiders

twitter.com/sid_webspiders

Microsoft’s Silverlight is a web technology that is used to build Rich Internet Applications and is based on .NET Framework. Silverlight apps can be used as an alternative to Adobe Flash.  Silverlight supports Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer.

Silverlight supports data binding with SQL Server, which makes it an ideal choice to build RIA business apps. Silverlight apps are coded in XAML and it works across different operating systems and devices. Silverlight helps to build visually rich consumer experiences with its extensive layouts and styling options, strong data access, and its support for user interaction and high-definition media. Silverlight apps can be built quickly with Microsoft Visual Studio, Expression Studio, and Web Platform.

Ektron Inc. is a web content management platform and provides solutions to manage multilingual web content. It uses XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) format to translate content in an efficient manner. XLIFF is used to exchange data and enables translators to translate the text, without worrying about the layout, or the links of the text.

By using Ektron, website visitors can select the language of their choice and can view the website’s refreshed content, with all the links and titles in their chosen language. Ektron is a unique company that allows for improvement on operational efficiency, and helps developers benefit from its Microsoft .NET framework. Lloyd International Translations (LIT) is one of the many companies that uses Ektron- enabled websites. It provides site visitors with options to view the website in French, German or U.K English. The links and the text will be refreshed and can be viewed in the selected language.

PlayStation Canada is another such company that uses the Ektron platform. Ektron helps the client to change content in real-time, without affecting the website’s graphics. Ektron also powers PlayStation Canada’s multilingual feature, and allows visitors to change the text and graphics from English to French with just a single click.

Ektron CMS400.NET Content Management Software is the perfect platform with all the equipment required to create, set up, and manage your website. Ektron CMS400.NET is suitable for both developers and non-technical businesses as well.

Developers can make use of the built-in Server Controls to  set up a website or to customize it through the well-documented API of CMS400.NET. Business users can benefit from a spontaneous UI to manage their website content. An inclusive SEO Toolkit ensures that your site can be found. WYSIWYG, the leading editor, to manage your web content and documents, is a part of Ektron CMS400.NET software. It also helps increase your site visitors, by providing RSS feeds, Web alerts and subscriptions.

To read the full features of this software, click here.

The fact that XML technology can retain the same source yet change the display is something that is contributing to its popularity day by day. Web designers have a great tool at hand in the form of Ektron CMS Smart Form (XML Config.). This tool gives them the freedom to maintain a structure and still design without any borders. It also gives content editors the freedom to create XML content and manage it effectively even if they do not possess much knowledge about it.

Ektron Smart Forms can be of use to web designers in two main ways. In the first the same data source can be used in order to generate a different output. Through the second way content editors can choose a layout using multiple Smart Forms. There are endless possibilities of web designing with Smart Form. XML/XSLT is a very useful technology that enables web designers to use it to their advantage with Ektron Smart Forms.

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