Silverlight is a development platform targeted towards Web and Mobile applications. Streaming Media, both live and on-demand were the most popular features of Silverlight when it was introduced, but it later spread to multimedia, graphics and animation. It has gradually evolved into a product that delivers Rich Internet Applications and premium media experiences on the web. For Silverlight to operate on your web portal you need a plugin to be installed on the browser. The Latest version, Silverlight 5 was introduced in 2011 and the last release was in Jan,2019. Some of the salient features of Silverlight 5 are as below :
Perspective 3D graphics – It provides developers with the ability to render content on a 3D plane. It has an in-built XNA #D graphics API facilitates the developers (without writing any explicit code) to rotate or scale live content.
High Resolution Images via Deep Zoom – Deep Zoom is considered to be a new technology facilitating faster and smoother zooming onto High resolution images and frame rates in a marginally low load time. The storage of images is optimized in Silverlight which automatically decides the amount of data to be downloaded to fill the provisioned pixels on the screen, hence providing optimized webpages.
Video Support – Silverlight 5 has extended the number of codecs that it supports, standard as well as third-party. IIS Smooth streaming a new extension that enables on-demand video streaming through HTTP protocols.
Having said that, Microsoft has set the End of Support date for Silverlight 5 to October 2021. Even though Microsoft hasn’t officially claimed to stop any further releases of Silverlight, they have conveyed that the market is moving away from plug-in-based delivery mechanisms to unified plug-in free players. While retaining Silverlight for out-of-browser application and on IE-11, they have urged their customers using Silverlight for Media to move to DASH/MSE/CENC/EME based designs.
Below is a list of probable technologies you can migrate to from Silverlight
HTML5
HTML5 is the latest version of the HTML standard, created with a perspective to making it more user friendly and extending support for latest Multimedia formats. HTML5 constitutes markups, APIs and is aligned with DOM (Document Object Model). Its lightweight features further make it a go-to solution for cross-platform mobile applications even for low-powered devices.
Moving to HTML5 is easier as it requires basic development skills hence the learning curve for a developer is low. With the use of JavaScript, HTML5 is considered capable of replacing Adobe Flash for displaying Video and multimedia content on a webpage. Since iOS doesn’t support flash, most websites have moved to HTML5 to support their multimedia content.
Angular JS
Angular is a vastly spread JS framework used mainly by high traffic web sites. Introduced by Google, Angular belongs to the MEAN stack (Mongo Db, Express, Angular, Node.js) of JavaScript Development.
Based on the MVC architecture, it has a two-way-data-binding feature which binds changes in the object to the changes in UI. Angular has a strong community of users hence you have constant access to solutions, training materials and discussions.
Electron.io
Incase you are in need to migrating your Silverlight desktop applications, Electron.io is a scalable and flexible option that you can consider. Electron is Cross-platform, compatible with Windows, Linux and Mac as well. It is an opensource project maintained by GitHub and hence has an extended community of contributors. Electron has embedded crash reporting features which helps you to retain Crash reports inside a temporary directory or setup a server to access and process these reports. Further content tracking lets you evaluate performance bottlenecks based on data generated by Chromium’s content module. With the support of Node.js, Angular or React you can also develop your Web Applications in Electron with HTML and JavaScript.
React JS
React is a Java script library popularly known for its Component based UIs. Created by Facebook and a community of developers, it has a large number of organizations under its belt like Facebook, Netflix, BBC, Dropbox, Airbnb and many more.
The prominent feature of React is its reusability of code. The Components developed in React are independent and can be reused at multiple venues. This enables a consistent look and feel across the project and helps developers focus on the business logic than the appearance of the website. Also, the introduction of Virtual DOM enables React to provide faster and scalable web applications.
Irrespective of the technology you choose, it is recommended to get a detailed Migration Plan from the team of experts guiding the project. Migrating to a different technology mainly involves redevelopment of your core services. Hence the development methodology and Testing strategy used for the project are the prominent areas of concern.
We at clarion offer a team of experts that can make this transition seamless for you. A few of our technical expertise encompasses Web development (.Net, ASP, AngularJS), Mobile development, Cloud & Strategy development, Internet of Things, Analytics & BI, Application Testing, and Agile Project Management.
Do feel free to reach out to us with your development needs. Our team of experts will be glad to assist you.
