Microsoft ready to ‘Mesh it up’

Taking a page from Apple’s PR playbook, the company sends out a teaser invitation for an April 24 event to launch Live Mesh, but offers no new details.

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Silver Light – Microsoft Implementation of RIA

My previous blog was about Google Gear- RIA (Rich Interactive Application) implementation from Google. Silverlight is Microsoft RIA implementation. According to Microsoft “Silverlight™ is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.”

“Silverlight will enable higher quality and better applications in the browser,” says Microsoft director of product management Forest Key. “Silverlight is a factored version of .NET that is optimized for the Web and simple deployment. It carries with it proven technology, access to a variety of languages for development, such as JavaScript, VB, C#, Ruby and Python, WPF [Windows Presentation Foundation] support for controls and code-reuse, AJAX integration, and more. We are providing a highly integrated set of tools that facilitate new levels of collaboration between designers and developers and allows them to build amazing experiences while addressing the ‘lost in translation’ issue that is so common at most organizations.”

Silverlight is also trying to eliminate various Flash deficiencies by offering much higher quality video. Microsoft says that Silverlight supports up to 720p video–1280 x 720 resolution much higher then Flash. And unlike Flash, Silverlight won’t require any expensive back-end servers for companies wishing to rollout the technology also Silverlight supports all major Web browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and even Apple Safari, which runs only on the Mac.

Silverlight uses vector graphics for higher quality, Microsoft says, and can be used to display text, graphics, video, and video with text and graphic overlays. It will work with existing Web technologies such as Apache, PHP, JavaScript, and XHTML. Microsoft is also creating various Expression tools for creating and deploying Silverlight content, though these will be Windows-only.

Currently not enough documentation is present on SilverLight but there are some white papers present on Microsoft site discussing architecture and overview of SilverLight. Also there are number of videos present on Microsoft site featuring silver light implementation by different clients for different solutions.

Following are some useful links;

Silverlight Architecture: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb428859.aspx

Silverlight Site: http://silverlight.net/

Silverlight Demo: http://ds.pilot.serving-sys.com/BurstingRes/WPFE/msn_tech.html

BBC Radio Demo: http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/7/2/f72cff89-5769-4bd1-ab7d-f4333adbef16/BBC_mix.wmv

Google in Microsoft Boundaries- Google Gear

Microsoft the ultimate and undisputed king of Desktop world is enjoying its dream spell for the past 10 years; on the other hand Google the “Innovator” is continuously releasing Internet centric software, based on fresh ideas and user demands such as Google Map, Google Desktop, Google Blogger, and lots of other Googlies. So far both empires have their boundaries defined and emperors were playing within it. Google Desktop search was the first attempt of Google penetration in Microsoft boundary which was not successful as it was countered by more powerful Microsoft Desktop search. Now Google is ready for a new attempt with its new weapon named as Google Gear! So what is Google Gear? A free, open-source multi-platform JavaScript application programming interface (API) that lets Web applications work offline. Below are the words from Google Representative

“With Google Gears, we’re tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in a statement. “We believe strongly in the power of the community to stretch this new technology to the limits of what’s possible and ultimately emerge with an open standard that benefits everyone.”

Google hopes Gears will become the standard for adding offline capabilities such as data storage, application caching, and multithreading to online applications.

David Mitchell Smith, Gartner web analyst, said that “The idea of taking Web applications offline is big,” he said. While Google Gears can be viewed as a competitive move against Microsoft, he said that’s not the only valid frame of reference.

Google Gears is also a threat for rich Internet applications. “Rich clients become less compelling the more the Web applications continue to grow,” said Smith from Google. “Ajax has certainly taken a bite out of the opportunities that RIA developers thought they had.”

Following are three Key features of Google Gear;

1. A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server.
2. A database, to store and access data from within the browser.
3. A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

Google Gear is currently compatible with following set of browsers;

• Apple Mac OS X (10.2 or higher)
  o Firefox 1.5 or higher
• Linux
  o Firefox 1.5 or higher
• Microsoft Windows (XP or higher)
  o Firefox 1.5 or higher
  o Internet Explorer 6 or higher

Following are some useful links related to Google Gear

Google Gear: http://gears.google.com/
Sample Tutorial: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/tutorial.html
Sample Applications: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/sample.html