Microsoft Silverlight takes on Adobe, AJAX
Silverlight, Microsoft’s answer to Adobe’s Flash player, is getting backing from .NET, the company’s application development platform.
The company is also offering free hosting and bandwidth for Silverlight-developed applications, opened up a few more web services APIs and made its commercial licensing terms more generous.
The products and services were announced by Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, during a keynote speech at the company’s Mix 07 developers conference.
Silverlight is a browser plug-in runtime not unlike the ubiquitous Flash player from Adobe. Microsoft launched it at a broadcasters’ conference two weeks ago, and it’s largely designed for video playback with flashy graphical interactivity — now often referred to as rich internet applications or RIAs.
Now, according to Ozzie and other Microsoft executives who took the stage yesterday, Silverlight is based on the .NET framework and will act as a runtime for .NET applications to run in the browser.
It’s a way for Microsoft to attract developers interested in making web applications that a more functional than the typical old-style form-based interface. Nowadays, that means AJAX developers, using primarily JavaScript on the browser side.
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