[mapguide-internals] Future Development Options for Web Server Extensions and new High Performance Viewer

[carlj]

As regards Silverlight I did quite a bit of investigation into developing
with it. Having been working in a .Net company Silverlight was more
compatible with the skills in the company. (I must confess I didn't have
much success with getting Silverlight used in the company but there are
libraries relating to MapGuide which I deliberately wrote such that they
could be compiled to Silverlight but it will be up to the company I am
leaving whether they choose to take advantage of that in the future).

Silverlight is a bit trickier than it first appears. It is not a full .Net
platform. It is only a subset of the API's. What is more any libraries to be
used with Silverlight have to be specifically compiled to work with
Silverlight and Silverlight therefore cannot use any existing .Net
libraries. On this line I am almost certain that Silverlight does not
support calling into any native code. That means that any viewer would have
to be implemented in pure Silverlight compatible .Net. 

If creating .Net from scratch then the source code can be created such that
it uses a subset of .Net which can both be compiled to regular .Net and
Silverlight using some conditional compilation (pre-processor) statements to
work around bits where different things need to be done for each platform.

On the Java front, Java in the browser is the same as Java on the desktop.
It can call into native code (which is why browser Applets using JOGL work).
The JOGL needs a native library to provide the bridge between Java and
OpenGL. The Webstart mechanism can detect the target platform and make sure
the right native library is sent out to the client. This allows the same
applet to work across platforms. 

I am dubious from Microsoft’s business practices that the cross platform
story for Silverlight is likely to be as good as Java. 

Java may bring negative images to a lot of people because in the past
Applets were pretty ugly and the plug-in wasn't good however there is big
momentum to clean up Applets due to JavaFX. Sun has been very much committed
to JavaFX which involves trying to slim down Java and improve appearance and
performance so it can compete with Flash. Larry Ellison of Oracle has also
expressed full support for JavaFX.
Even if the JavaFX side is not use the whole effort has meant that lots of
improvements in the plug-in and client side performance and start-up times
etc have been made and continue to be made which improve the performance of
any Applets not just JavaFX ones.

My thinking was to try and create the basic components in Java and .Net.
These would be the building blocks to create a viewer.  For me I can get
more done if I focus on one platform. This means I hope to focus on a Java
based viewer but could provide libraries which would assist in helping
someone else if they want to build a Silverlight viewer.  

-- 
View this message in context: http://n2.nabble.com/Future-Development-Options-for-Web-Server-Extensions-and-new-High-Performance-Viewer-tp4208470p4213044.html
Sent from the MapGuide Internals mailing list archive at Nabble.com.