Chapter 13. Silverlight: IronPython in the browser
This chapter covers
- Packaging a dynamic Silverlight application
- Using the Silverlight APIs
- Building user interfaces
- Interacting with the browser DOM
Improved browser capabilities, enabled by faster computers, have not only made complex and rich web applications possible, but have also changed the way we use computers. Techniques like AJAX, and powerful JavaScript libraries that abstract away painful cross-browser issues, have resulted in client-side (in the browser) programming becoming one of the most important fields in modern software development. Despite this, web applications remain restricted by the user interface capabilities of JavaScript and the performance of JavaScript when running large programs. Ways around these difficulties include web-programming frameworks such as Flash, AIR, Flex, and Silverlight, which have their own programming and user interface models.
In case you haven’t heard of it, Silverlight is a cross-platform browser plugin created by Microsoft. It is superficially similar to Flash but with the magic extra ingredient that we can program it with Python. Because Silverlight is based on the .NET framework, it is a major new platform that IronPython runs on.
Silverlight has a user interface model based on Windows Presentation Foundation, and we can use it to do some exciting things, such as media streaming, creating games, and building rich internet applications.