Online chat solutions have been very popular long before AJAX was born. There are numerous reasons for this popularity, and you’re probably familiar with them if you’ve ever used an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client, or an Instant Messenger (IM) program, or a Java chat applet. AJAX has pushed online chat solutions forward by making it easy to implement features that are causing trouble or are harder to implement with other technologies. First of all, an AJAX chat application inherits all the typical AJAX benefits, such as integration with existing browser features, and (if written well) cross-platform compatibility.
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Borland Delphi is known to be a great environment for the development of stand-alone and client-server applications on the Microsoft Windows platform. Its virtues range from full OOP support to visual development, in a unique combination of power and ease. However, the new frontier of development is now Internet programming. What has Delphi got to offer in this new context? Which are the features you can rely upon to build great Internet applications with Delphi? That’s what this paper intends to reveal. We’ll see that Delphi can be used:
• For direct socket and TCP/IP programming;
• In conjunction with third-party components that implement the most common Internet protocols, on the client or the server side;
• To produce HTML pages on the server side, with the WebBroker and Internet Express architectures;
• As well as to work with Microsoft’s core technologies, including MTS, COM, ASP, and ActiveX.
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Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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As the desire to deliver rich web content and functionality has increased over the last decade, Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies have become increasingly powerful. Unfortunately, many of these technologies have been out of reach for many client application developers because of the non-trivial learning curve involved. In addition, with the number of RIA technologies available, where do you even begin? In many cases, there was not a “one size fits all” solution, so RIA development would involve a mix of HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash, and perhaps a little AJAX thrown in (just to name a few possibilities).
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Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 introduces a whole new set of .NET technologies that will revolutionize, once again, the way you develop smart client and web-based applications; the most notable being LINQ, WPF and, of course, Silverlight. For most of us working in and around web application development in the business world, Silverlight is a big step forward; especially if you consider that it provides clean coding practices with extensible languages (e.g. XAML and C#). It also provides some of Visual Studio’s rich programming model that we have become accustomed to and can no longer live without; such as class libraries, debugging capabilities and IntelliSense among many others.
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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
WPF provides a unified framework for building applications with rich user interfaces and interactivity. It is built on top of the .Net Framework and makes use of the managed and unmanaged code. WPF programming model allows the developers to write code once and deploy it as a standalone installed application or in a browser.
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Microsoft gives a name to its Flash-killer technology. The technology formerly known as WPF/E is now known as Silverlight. Microsoft has given a go-to-market name for its cross-platform, cross-browser plug-in for delivering the next generation of user experiences and rich Internet applications for the Web. The technology formerly known as WPF/E is now known as Silverlight.
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What Is Silverlight?
Silverlight is a new Web presentation technology that is created to run on a variety of platforms. It enables the creation of rich, visually stunning and interactive experiences that can run everywhere: within browsers and on multiple devices and desktop operating systems (such as the Apple Macintosh). In consistency with WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the presentation technology in Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 (the Windows programming infrastructure), XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) is the foundation of the Silverlight presentation capability.
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