Are there any reason to use Silverlight front-ends over HTML/JS web apps? | Hacker News Reader

Are there any reason to use Silverlight front-ends over HTML/JS web apps?

3birdsmarketing.com

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I'm working at a company, where upper management is leaning towards using Silverlight instead of my recommendations to stick to native web applications.It may end up not being up to me, but I have staked my career and learning path on Web Applications being the way to go so it surprises me.

Has anyone had any success in building Silverlight apps?

It is for our products front-end. It will be tool for building websites, newsletters so I figure it will be even more awkward to use as we'll need to be laying out HTML with in the Silverlight environment which from what I can tell is going to be grossly inelegant. That's just one of the immediate/obvious issues I can see.<p>How is the OS X version? Does it lag behind in versions? Is it buggy?

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I thought this would be an 'ask hn' type thing, but it appears to just go to a marketing page.

I'm not sure there's much of a compelling reason for using Silverlight or Flash or JavaFX for front-ends in most cases. If you have a particular design or interactive needs and there's already a library or component that works in the particuar front-end tech you're looking at (a silverlight charting lib, for example), then it'd probably make sense to use silverlight. However, that's mostly from a pragmatic cost-only view, nothing to do with the technology qualities itself.

From what I recall, Silverlight does make it somewhat easier (compare to Flash) to interact with javascript on a page where the SL app is hosted. However, javascript interacts with javascript even better.

The bigger question to ask, imo, is are there things you can't do in JS that you need to? If so, use SL/Flex/whatever. Realize that you're likely limiting the audience somewhat, especially if you're going the Silverlight route. However, doing cutting edge JS is also going to limit the audience somewhat too, as not everyone is running (or can run) the latest browser versions.

FWIW, 3birds, if you're reading this, come on our to our PHP/MySQL meet up next week - we're in Carrboro, and you're in Chapel Hill :)

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