Ajax, Atlas and Avalon – Part 3
About: This is the third and last part in a series of posts about the present and future state of User Interface programming models and their applicability in various scenarios.
Hello Everyone,
This series of posts introduces the three programming models that in my opinion are going to occupy significant portion of current and future development in the world of user interfaces, I addressed AJAX and Atlas in my previous posts and will be focusing on Avalon in the current one
What is Avalon?
Avalon is the next generation framework for building rich and smart clients that could only be built by very experienced graphic programs in the past. Avalon, renamed as ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’ (WPF) is part of the WinFX APIs that will be released with Windows Vista.
What are the key features of Avalon?
Avalon will allow you to build applications using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML). If you have not guessed so far, XAML is based on XML, it allows developers to build applications that will radically increase the quality of user experience while significantly reducing the time required for developing these applications. Some of the functionality that XAML will allow developers to utilize in their applications includes
- 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional graphics and animation greatly improving what can be included in the user interfaces
- Vector based graphics – Unlike raster graphics where images are represented as a collection of pixels, vector based graphics allow for the representation of images in geometrical entities such as points, lines, curves and polygons. Vector graphics allows for very rich UI features e.g. the capability to zoom without distorting the image.
- Capability to include audio and video, the videos can be overlayed on top of each other so a background video is running while multiple smaller videos can be running in focus on top. Yes I know its hard to visualize and understand why would you ever want to do that, you have to take a peak at the demo applications to understand and appreciate these features. You can look at some of the concept videos at http://msdn.microsoft.com/windowsvista/community/events/conceptvid/default.aspx
- Fixed and flow format documents
- Library of common controls, ability to develop custom controls easily, do data binding and setup styles
And much much more, although many of these features are very exciting, in my opinion the key advantage of Avalon lies not in the feature set but in the ease of use for exploiting these features and the significant reduction in the amount and complexity of code required for doing so.
Why will I ever use Avalon when I can use Ajax/Atals?
Whereas Ajax/Atlas or traditional web applications offer a number of advantages there are business needs which require the development of rich clients. These business requirements include the need to operate offline and the need to have rich user graphics and functionality not achievable through HTML. Some of the disadvantages of using Avalon or any rich clients include the issues around compatibility with user machines and the difficulties of deployment. However, the problems of IT departments cannot be transferred to the business users, organizations that attempted to do that have suffered from what Dr. James Gosling, the creator of Java language called an ‘HTML backlash’. The software vendors have come up with a ‘smart client’ architecture that offers the advantages of both web and rich clients while minimizing the disadvantages of these two models. I will write more on smart clients in future blog posts.
Conclusion
AJAX and Atlas allow you to build web applications that are more responsive and feature rich. Avalon is the next generation of programming interfaces that will allow you to build radically improved rich and smart client applications significantly enhancing what IT can offer to its business user. Depending on the business needs and scenarios you may choose the alternative that is best suited to serve your business customers.
Part 1: http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/2006/01/14/512991.aspx
Part 2: http://blogs.msdn.com/mohammadakif/archive/2006/01/23/516425.aspx
