I’m in the early planning phase for a project and determining whether to use Silverlight or the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). There are obviously a lot of things to consider, but this question is specifically concerning deployment.
This application is intended for intranets; i.e. it is not a hosted website and is intended to be deployed at a customer’s site. The target company size is small, so most would likely prefer to run on their pre-existing servers. The intent is not to sell the code base along with the application, so code security is a concern.
Given that:
Which is easiest to deploy?
Which is better for code security?
Which is better suited for deployment to the majority of small servers?
Both will work.
Both can be secured.
Neither place a heavy load on servers.
Use what makes more sense to the user. If I were using in Intranet application, I would probably want something that doesn’t require me to download anything and runs smoothly in the browser. That makes me lean towards using the Google Web Toolkit (as long as you’re comfortable with coding in Java).
If you think your users will be able to and ok with downloading Silverlight and you’re a MS developer, go for it. The only downside is that your users have to download and install a runtime AND you might be using more internal bandwidth.