Web Technologies

Sooner or later I suspect the client/server system I work on will go to the web. Therefore I figure I had better learn web development. But what technology should I learn? There are many to choose from.

At first I took a Java programming class. Currently I am taking a class on HTML and CSS. However these are just the basics. There are web specific technologies out there which are waiting to be learned

I hear that AJAX is a simple choice. It allows you to update sections of a web page instead of reloading the whole darn thing. And if you want to do animation, then Adobe Flash is the tool for you. These days however, I hear more about Adobe AIR than Flash.

Finally the Microsoft solution is Silverlight. The latest incarnation of this technology is Silverlight 3. This product is focused on rich Internet applications. In other words, if you want a web app to look like a mature desktop app, pick Silverlight. You get .NET support to boot.

Microsoft XML

I just subscribed to Microsoft’s MSDN magazine. This month’s issue had a number of references to XML technology. I guess this is a sign that XML is here to stay. The buzzwords I read about were OOXML, XmlLite, and XAML.

OOXML stands for the Open Office XML. It was developed by Microsoft, and is used as the file format for Office 2007 applications. This is not related to the open source OpenOffice applications.

XmlLite is a library for high performance XML applications. It is shipped as a DLL. XmlLite comes with C++ support. You can use it out of the box with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It does not do XML validation (to achieve high performance).

XAML stands for extensible application markup language. It is used a lot in the .NET framework. Specifically it is used in WPF, Silverlight, and WF.