We have an E-Commerce site that allows users to buy products, view their shopping basket etc. It is written in Silverlight. Unfortunately many users refuse to install it, or have an iPad and hate Microsoft etc. Should we make a HTML version? I’ve done plenty of WinForms work in the past. It would look pretty crappy compared to the Silverlight version.
Maybe I should try and use a lot of AJAX? Then I might be able to re-use the existing Silverlight Web Service more easily.
And what’s all this fuss about MVC? I haven’t tried this yet. Maybe now is the time?
So many options… Any suggestions on appropriate technology and architecture would be much appreciated. The aim is to do this with minimum work 🙂
I should also add that this site is sold as a product to our customers. That means whatever technology I use should easily support multiple skins and even customized behavior.
Cheers
Mark
I would suggest trying out MVC and building a ASP .NET website. It will be much easier to port a silverlight application to an ASP application since they both run on the .NET framework. Your users will not need to install anything funky, and for fancier things, you can use javascript (Personally, I like to use the JQuery library). Best of all, the language (C# or VB) will be the same!
If you built your Silverlight app using the MVVM pattern (a lot of silverlight apps use this pattern), you will be able to see the similarities to an MVC pattern (Model View Controller). Also, if you have a web service already, it should be easy to reuse it with an ASP website.
HTML5 might be a little too soon for most customers, especially if they use a browser that is not ie9. It will also be more work to convert it, especially if you are using a database, which i assume you are. That’s the beauty of moving to ASP; it will most likely be pretty simple to reuse most of your code.
I hope this helps!