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Microsoft SilverLight All Set to Shine - Develops SilverLight for Mobiles
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Microsoft’s SilverLight has indeed come a long way since the last time WATBlog took a peek into the technology. I could not help but reflect on Ankit’s parting lines,
“knowing Microsoft, they might just deliver a killer product”
It’s been a few months since Microsoft launched the second version of SilverLight. The very highlight of SilverLight 2.0 is that it’s based on Microsoft’s .NET platform, as opposed to JavaScript in the case of 1.0. This makes SilverLight simplify development across multiple platforms and enables developers to build richer and more user-friendly functions, thus appealing to a wider audience on the Web.
The very next competitor to Microsoft’s SilverLight is a long reiging emperor, Adobe’s Flash. With almost every video and online gaming site fully embedded with Flash files, it’s going to take Microsoft a hell more than just a technology to dethrone them.
However, what makes SilverLight a potential winner is because Flash codes are not search engine friendly at all, whereas SilverLight is. Today, despite increase in the available bandwidth for the general internet users, not many web site even dares to transform themselves into Flash-based portals for fear of getting lost from the search results. Such a scenario is a thing of the past now. According to Microsoft officials,
“Microsoft designed Silverlight from the beginning to be easily accessible by search engines. Because it is simply a ZIP archive, a Silverlight application packaged in a XAP (the Silverlight application-package file extension) file is easily accessible to search engines without a special software development kit (SDK). And because XAML is W3C-compliant XML, any static textual XAML content can be easily parsed by search engines. Furthermore, any metadata embedded in the ZIP file is easily indexed by search engines as well. Silverlight applications also support “deep linking” as they easily consume the URL they were loaded from, and use information on the URL query string to rapidly load and display appropriate data. Finally, the Silverlight DOM itself can be easily inspected to detect all text, links and images that are being visualized by the control.”
Despite all the ogling over the desktop version of SilverLight, Microsoft doesn’t plan to stand still and is all out to conquer the mobile internet market too. After reports of developing the mobile version of Internet Explorer, it’s time for SilverLight to delve into mobile phones. Although it’s sad that the technology shall be available only for Windows Mobile, the very prospect of more competition might make Adobe sweat profusely. This is because there has already been a mobile version of Adobe Flash, christened as Adobe Flash Lite, enabling interactive content on mobile phones. What might be more disconcerting for Adobe is the news of NOKIA embracing the SilverLight technology in all its mobiles.
S Somesagar, head of Developer Division, Microsoft Corp, said
“We see the 2.4 billion global installed base of mobile phones as a major opportunity and intend using Silverlight to exploit it.”
The current mobile market seems to be all hot with news, with every mobile company worth its salt trying its best to dethrone the other from their obvious advantages. With the expected launch of the iPhone in the Indian market and also allocation of 3G services in the offing, it is saddening to know that iPhone’s Safari bowser won’t support SilverLight and might force many to miss attractive interactive content in future, just the way iPhone and PowerPC users had to miss live coverage of the ongoing Olympic Games in China.
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