Silverlight aims to compete with Adobe Flash and the presentation components of AJAX. It also competes with Sun Microsystems’ JavaFX, which was launched a few days after Silverlight.

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Microsoft describes its advantages as follows:

Compelling Cross-Platform User Experiences

• Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
• Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is under 2 megabytes (MB) in size and works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Windows-based and Macintosh computers without any additional installation requirements.
• Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
• Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application.
• Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight.

Flexible Programming Model with Collaboration Tools

• Based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, Silverlight enables developers and designers to easily use existing skills and tools to deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web.
• Simple integration with existing Web technologies and assets means Silverlight works with any back-end Web environment or technology. No “rip and replace” required.
• Silverlight integrates with your existing infrastructure and applications, including Apache, PHP, as well as JavaScript and XHTML on the client.
• Choice of development languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C#, Visual Basic .NET, and more.
• Role-specific tools for both designers and developers that take advantage of Web standards and the breadth of the Microsoft .NET–connected software features.
• For designers: Microsoft Expression Studio for creating interactive user interfaces and media rich experiences, preparing media for encoding and distribution, and creating World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards-compliant sites using modern XHTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, and ASP.NET.
• For developers: Microsoft Visual Studio for developing client and server code with full Microsoft IntelliSense, powerful cross-platform debugging, rich language support, and more.
• Consistent presentation model by using XAML, the declarative presentation language used in Windows Vista–based applications. Controls, visual designs, media, and other elements can be presented with full design fidelity in both Silverlight and Windows–based applications.
• Extensible control model makes it easy to add rich content and behaviors while enabling efficient code-reuse and sharing.
• Dramatically improved performance for AJAX–enabled Web sites with the power, performance, and flexibility of Silverlight and .NET-connected software.

High Quality, Low Cost Media

• Unified media format that scales from high definition (HD) to mobile with Windows Media Video (WMV), the Microsoft implementation of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) VC-1 video standard, as well as support for Windows Media Audio (WMA) and MP3 audio.
• Add vector-based graphics and overlays to media with support for integration of graphics that scale to any size and broadcast-style overlays for tickers and closed captioning.
• Flexible ad-insertion solutions with video and animation, including the ability to deliver fluid, broadcast-style video or animated advertisements without loss of visual fidelity or motion quality.
• Lower-cost media streaming with Emmy Award–winning Windows Media technologies that can lower the cost of streaming delivery by up to 46%, and enjoy the flexibility to work with your existing Windows Media streaming deployments. Even further cost reductions are possible with the upcoming Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) Media Pack for Microsoft Windows Server 2008.
• Broad ecosystem of media tools, servers, and solutions compatible with the Windows Media operating system.
• Microsoft PlayReady content-access technology that delivers a single solution for digital rights management support on both Windows-based and Macintosh computers for content providers (coming in Silverlight 1.1)
• Powerful encoding tools for live and on-demand publishing of media experiences with Microsoft Expression Encoder, including hardware-accelerated encoding of WMV and VC-1 at up to 15 times the performance of software alone when paired with a Tarari Encoder Accelerator board.

Connected to Data, Servers, and Services

• Mash-up and incorporate services and data from the Web by taking advantage of the Silverlight support for LINQ while accessing that data with common protocols like JSON, RSS, POX, and REST.
• Increase discoverability of rich interactive application (RIA) content that can be indexed and searched due to the text-based XAML format that describes interface and content in a Silverlight-based application.
• Rapidly scale applications with Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live to host and integrate software services and media content.

Streaming audio and video

• Silverlight Streaming by Windows Live offers a free streaming and application hosting solution for delivering high-quality, cross-platform, cross-browser, media-enabled rich interactive applications (RIAs). With the ability to author content in Microsoft Expression Encoder and other third-party editing environments, Web designers maintain complete control of the user experience.

Microsoft is finally making real efforts to woo the designer community who have traditionally worshipped the Adobe and Mac product ranges. One new product that addresses this previously overlooked community is Silverlight, which uses the XAML technology and is touted as Microsoft’s Flash killer. For anyone who is keen to listen, Microsoft proposes that Silverlight will achieve similar results to Flash, but it does so in an entirely different way and has different aims. So, the big question is, will Microsoft be able to break the dominance of Adobe’s Flash platform, that is available on the PC, Mac and mobile devices alike? I’m sure the jury is out on that one, but it can be said it is an uphill task.

So what is Silverlight and XAML proposition? How does it vary from Flash?

Microsoft Silverlight is a proprietary runtime for browser-based Rich Internet Applications, providing a subset of the animation, vector graphics, and video playback capabilities of Windows Presentation Foundation. The runtime is available for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support under development via the third-party Moonlight runtime.

Not much difference to Flash so far…

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) is a declarative XML-based language used to initialize structured values and objects. XAML is used extensively in the .NET Framework 3.0 technologies, particularly in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), where it is used as a user interface markup language to define UI elements, data binding, eventing, and other features, and in Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF), in which workflows themselves can be defined using XAML.

Not much difference to Adobes’s MXML…

Browser support…

A frequently asked question is which browsers and operating systems will it run on? If XAML is limited in this area, its usefulness in the web world will also be significantly limited. Previous encarnations of XAML, were limited and justifiably criticised as it would only work with an ActiveX control. However, this has now been resolved with support for Firefox, Opera, Safari and Netscape, Windows and OSX alike. Support is provided by a downloadable plugin, much like Flash!

Like Flash…

Silverlight enables web developers to create visually rich user interfaces and animations, play video clips and stream media within the web page, again, much like Flash! But it is different! The comparison doesn’t end there. Animations are organised using timelines and frames within the tool…how else would you organise an animation without timelines?!

Like Flex…but not!

Where things differ from Flash are the tools used to develop the Silverlight applications. Silverlight is supposed to be a way of designing and building rich user interfaces. However, standard HTML elements are missing. The way you design a particular interface is to build a standard HTML form in your favourite editor, e.g. Dreamweaver CS3, and then open this page in Silverlight to add the visual enhancements that your design requires. This sounds complicated to say the least. In comparison, Flash has a brilliant tool and framework called Flex that does this far more gracefully and with the development of Thermo, designers can really feel comfortable in the web application development mix.

Silverlight applications will also run on mobile devices, but the plan is for the applications to only run within a mobile web browser. This is unlike Adobe who are feaverishly developing the AIR runtime to allow Flash applications to run independently of the browser environment and offline.

So, Web 2.0 and beyond with Silverlight and XAML may be somewhat jumping the gun. You may say that there is nothing new or innovative with the Silverlight offering. It does, however, serve to emphasise how important the Rich Internet arena is becoming or indeed has become.

For a long time now Adobe’s Flex IDE has been the only tool for developing ActionScript 3 applications. Now there is an alternative in the form of PowerFlasher’s FDT 3.0.

Developed for internal by PowerFlasher, the FDT (Flash Development Tool) wowed freelancers so much that the company decided to launch it as a commercial product. Like Flex Builder, FDT is built upon the Eclipse framework and therefore has many similarities with other Eclipse-based tools, not least JDT upon which it is based.

It is great to see competing tools out there on the market and it can only serve to strengthen the popularity of the technology.

PowerFlasher’s tool can be found at http://fdt.powerflasher.com. It is really worth a look.

After installing ColdFusion 8 and Apache successfully you may still see an “HTTP 500 Internal Server Error” when navigating to a ColdFusion page. All is not lost, you simply need to configure, or check the configuration of Apache.

Apache requires very little post installation modification, but it is always good practice to check the httpd.conf file to ensure that the ColdFusion “install” scripts did what they were supposed to do.

If you haven’t confirmed that Apache is running, open your browser and point it to http://localhost/ (unless you specified a real URL during installation). You should see the Apache test page. If you see an error, review the Apache installation steps to make sure you followed all the steps correctly, and/or check your log files for more detailed errors.

Now we know Apache is running, but how about ColdFusion? Point your browser to the ColdFusion Administrator found commonly at http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm and see what happens. One of three possible failures could occur:

1. Your browser prompts you to save the .cfm file to your computer. There a couple of possible resolutions to this. Firstly restart the Apache service. If this does not resolve the issue you will need to check the httpd.conf file to ensure that the ColdFusion module is being loaded. The file can typically be found in the C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf\ directory.
   Make sure that the DirectoryIndex has a reference to the index.cfm file (i.e. the default file):Ensure that the LoadModule jrun_module "C:/ColdFusion8/runtime/lib/wsconfig/1/mod_jrun22.so" is also present:

   

   If you need to edit this file, restart the Apache service after you have saved the changes.

2. You get a message that the CFIDE folder cannot be found. This is more likely to be a problem with where you placed the ColdFusion application during install. The default location is in the Apache directory (C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs), so check in the http.conf file to ensure the DocumentRoot is pointing correctly. Alternatively, copy this folder to your localhost webroot (e.g. C:\WebRoot) ensuring that the DocumentRoot points to your webroot (see the yellow box in the second screen-shot).
3. You get another message which probably means that you need to reinstall ColdFusion, and/or Apache!

And that is it, you can start using ColdFusion and developing applications.

A few months ago I posted an article on Installing Apache on Vista, and it proved to be extremely popular. It appears that I was not the only one who found it a non trivial matter.

Now it is the turn of ColdFusion 8. ColdFusion 8 as we well know is the latest and greatest incarnation of the ColdFusion platform from Adobe. It has a lot of great new features such as cfimage, cfzip, cfexchange, some contentious features such as cfthread and cfinterface, and some not-so-necessarily-cool new “Web 2.0″ features such as cffeed and cfajax. But since this article isn’t about any of these, I better stick to the topic.

Like my article on installing Apache, installing ColdFusion on Vista is again not a trivial matter and involves only what can colloquially described as a “shed load of steps”. I’m probably being a little harsh towards ColdFusion as many of the problems I encountered were more closely related to Apache than ColdFusion.

NB: This article will assume that you have pre-installed Apache (although you could use IIS if so compelled), turned off Vista’s User Account Control (UAC), disabled any firewalls you have installed and finally, but most importantly, you have downloaded ColdFusion from the Adobe website.

Let us begin.

1. Find where you downloaded your copy of the ColdFusion Installer. Right-click on the executable file and specify to “Run as Administrator”. The installer should start and you should see the screenshot below. Select “English”, or which ever your language preference is, and Click “OK”.

   

2. The ColdFusion Installation progress screen may or may not be briefly displayed.

   

3. The Introduction screen will be displayed. Click “Next”.

   

4. The License Agreement screen will then be displayed. Agree to the “I accept the terms of the License Agreement” and Click “Next”.

   

5. The Install Type screen is then displayed. You don’t need to enter a serial number unless you are installing this into a production environment. Check “Developer Edition” and Click “Next”.

   

6. The Installer Configuration screen should be displayed. Since we already have Apache 2.x installed as our web server (if you want to use IIS, you will need to skip steps 11.1 and 11.2), check “Server configuration” and Click “Next”.

   

7. The Sub-component Installation screen should be displayed. This is one of the noticeable changes from version 7 to version 8 of ColdFusion. Hovering your mouse over each sub-component will describe in more detail what each sub-component does. If you plan to integrate .NET (especially with WebServices) or carry out Flex development then make sure that the “.NET Integration Services” and “LiveCycle Data Services” items are checked. For simplicities sake, check everything and Click “Next”.

   

8. The Select Installation Directory screen should be displayed. The default directory for a Serverconfiguration will be “C:\ColdFusion8″ on a Windows machine. Click “Next” to continue.

   

9. As you have chosen to install LiveCycle Data Services, you will need to agree to a further Licence Agreement screen. Click “Next”.

   

10. The Adobe Livecycle Data Services ES Installation screen is displayed. You will need to enter a serial number into this screen for production environments. Since I am going to assume a development environment, simply click “Next”.

    

11. The Configure Web Servers / Websites screen should be displayed. This is the point where we want to connect ColdFusion with Apache. By default “Configure web server connector for ColdFusion” is checked. We need to add Apache so Click “Add”.

    

    1. The Add Web Server Configuration screen is displayed, choose Apache from the drop-down.
    2. Add the relevant Apache directory paths, e.g.:

       

       1. The Configuration Directory C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf
       2. The Server Binary Directory C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\bin\httpd.exe
12. The Review Configured Web Server screen is then displayed. If all the settings are correct, click “Next”.

    

13. The Choose Adobe ColdFusion 8 Administrator Location screen should be displayed. Since we are using Apache for our web server then the default Directory should be pointing to C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs. You can alternatively point this to C:\WebRoot or wherever you have set up your web project files. Select “Next”.

    

14. The Adminstrator Password screen is then displayed, prompting for a password. Enter one, remember it (!!) and click “Next”.

    

15. The Enable RDS & Password screen is then displayed. If you want to use this, check the box and provide an additional password. Don’t use RDS in a production environment. Click “Next”.

    

16. The Pre-Installation Summary screen is then displayed, detailing your configuration. This is your last chance to go back and make changes. If everything is OK, click “Install”.

    

17. The Installing Adobe ColdFusion 8 screen is then displayed, showing a host of marketing messages.

    

18. The Please Wait screen is displayed, and be prepared to wait!

    

19. The Installation Complete screen is finally displayed and indeed the installation is complete. Now for the configuration! Click “Done”.

    

20. Configuration and Settings Migration Wizard. Open up a browser and enter the url http://localhost/CFIDE/administrator/index.cfm to begin the ColdFusion 8 Configuration and Settings Migration Wizard. Enter your password and Click “Login”.

    

21. ColdFusion will now begin Configuring Server, which could take any number of minutes to complete.

    

22. Once the Configuration Complete is displayed, you can login to the ColdFusion Administrator and start working, or playing, with the new interface, settings and Server Monitor.

    

So, that only 22 steps! That may be the longest installation process you may go through, but the power now at your finger tips to produce hugely interactive websites is a compelling reason why to choose this version of ColdFusion, or indeed ColdFusion over other products.

Both Web 2.0 and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) almost always depend up on the browser as a common denominator. It is with the web browser that web-based applications are accessed and run, yet the browser model is rapidly reaching its limitations.

Adobe thinks it has the answer and so now does Mozilla.

A year ago, most web developers had to think about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera and perhaps WAP for mobile devices and widget development for one of yet more platforms. Today the horizon is changing and web developers are afforded more opportunity and possibly with that more complexity, through offline development.

Browser extensions now exist that allow for the creation of offline web applications with Dojo Offline, Google Gears, Firefox 3, and other options on the market, pioneering the way and making it possible to take your web application with you on an aeroplane or an underground train.

The drive to make these offline applications desktop applications has also been thrown into the mix, with examples coming from Apple with WebKit Cocoa bindings, Adobe with AIR and Microsoft with Silverlight. Now it is the turn of Mozilla to enter the foray with a project called Prism.

Prism is part of an experiment by Mozilla designed to “bridge the divide in the user experience between web applications and desktop applications“. Essentially, Prism will allow you to create a desktop-like application out of individual websites. These site-specific applications are a growing trend and a trend heavily marketed by, not only Adobe, but now Mozilla, as ‘the future’.

While traditionally users have interacted mostly with desktop applications, more and more of them are using Web applications. But the latter often fit awkwardly into the document-centric interface of Web browsers.

In its current form, Prism doesn’t have the ability to function as a desktop application without access to the Internet, but Mozilla says it is “working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware.”

Instead of needing to run a browser to, for example, access Google Calendar, a simple icon can be clicked on the desktop. The icon will launch the Google Calendar application inside a Prism window, without any of the additional web browser bloat. This can have its benefits, especially when designing workflows and securing applications as the developer’s pain, the back button and address bar, are removed from the equation.

Although Mozilla may be excited about the concepts behind Prism, and Adobe about AIR not everyone shares the same enthusiasm, or has the working habits that require such an application-based approach. For some, the advantage of web applications is that they inherently aren’t desktop applications and everything can be handled in a single application almost anywhere on the planet, assuming a computer with a browser and web connection. However, Prism, AIR and Silverlight could end up offering the best of both worlds.

ColdFusion has never satisfactorily removed whitespace from generated content, however, removing this whitespace can dramatically improve your website’s performance. Take a 100KB page for example. If 20% of the page is made up of whitespace, that is 20% that is unneccessary and 20% bandwidth cost that can be saved.

Currently there are two main ways a ColdFusion developer can prevent whitespace; via the ColdFusion Administrator and by including certain tags in their code:

1. ColdFusion Administrator

Under the Server Settings > Settings menu item there is a checkbox called ‘Enable Whitespace Management’. This checkbox should always be checked. According to the description, checking this checkbox “reduces the file size of the pages that ColdFusion returns to the browser by removing many of the extra spaces, tabs, and carriage returns that ColdFusion might otherwise persist from the CFML source file.” I am yet to be convinced, but it is worthwhile enabling it.

2. ColdFusion Tags

<cfsetting enablecfoutputonly="true"></cfsetting>

The cfsetting tag controls aspects of page processing, such as the output of HTML code in pages (inside and outside the cfsetting tag body). If enablecfoutputonly is set to true, HTML output is blocked if it is not wrapped in a cfoutput tag. Therefore, this tag ‘can’ be used to minimise the amount of generated whitespace.

<cfsilent></cfsilent>

The cfsilent tag supresses output produced by CFML within a tag’s scope. Therefore, you simply need to wrap the tag around anything you don’t want to output to the browser. As it does not return anything from with in it, so you have to be a little be careful when debugging.

<cfprocessingdirective supresswhitespace="true"></cfprocessingdirective>

One of the cfprocessingdirective’s purposes is to remove excess whitespace from ColdFusion generated content in the tag body. However, it does not affect any whitespace in HTML code. You can nest the tags and toggle supresswhitespace on and off, not that I ever identify a good reason to do so.

But there is a little known third way, using a servlet filter called Trim Filter.

Servlet filters are tools available to web application developers. They are designed to be able to manipulate a request and response (or both) that is sent to a web application.

Trim Filter lets you decrease the size of file your server will send to all clients. The filter removes extra spaces and line breaks from outputted documents. This can be especially useful for WAP/WML developers working with mobile devices, where the size for transferred documents is limited.

Setting up the servlet filter in ColdFusion

Using the Trim Filter servlet filter found at the following URL:

http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/trimflt.htm

• Download the trimflt.jar
• Save trimflt.jar in the WEB-INF/lib folder in the ColdFusion Server wwwroot.
• Edit the web.xml file in the WEB-INF folder in the ColdFusion Server wwwroot with the following code:

• Restart the ColdFusion Service

And now, when a ColdFusion page is invoked, the whitespace is suppressed and wow does it do a good job.

Apache is controlled by a series of configuration files but the one we will be dealing with here is httpd.conf. This file contains instructions on how Apache should run. Several companies offer GUI-based Apache front-ends, but it’s easier to edit the configuration files by hand.

Remember to make back-up copies of all your Apache configuration files, in case one of the changes you make while experimenting renders the Web server inoperable.

Also, remember that configuration changes you make don’t take effect until you restart Apache.

Configure the httpd.conf File:

The httpd.conf file can be found in the conf directory in your Apache installation. In my case, this is the following location:

C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\conf

1. To include the correct default or index file, you need to find the following code and make sure that your default file name is included (see screenshot).

<IfModule>
DirectoryIndex index.htm index.html
</IfModule>

For ColdFusion and PHP you would also need to include their equivalents, i.e. index.cfm and index.php.

2. Set up a virtual host definition:

<virtualhost>
DocumentRoot c:\WebRoot
ServerName localhost
<directory>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</directory>
</virtualhost>

Make sure that the directory permissions are set otherwise a directory forbidden message (such as below) will be displayed.

3. Restart the Apache service. You should then be able to browse to your local website.

4. If you’re doing something cunning like setting up an alias for the local site, e.g. http://whatley.local/ rather than the usual http://localhost/whatley/ then you may need to edit your hosts file e.g.:

In my case, the hosts file is found in the following location: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. You can simply edit this file in notepad, much like with httpd.conf.

And that is all there is to it.

The excitment is brewing! From the Adobe MAX Europe 2007 website itself: Join us for MAX 2007 Europe, a unique opportunity to connect with the Adobe community for an educational and inspirational experience that can’t be found anywhere else.

We’re bringing together the most creative and influential minds in the community, from designers and developers to executives and partners, that will shape the future of our industry.

Adobe MAX is the one conference of the year where you can meet and interact with the teams who build Adobe platform technologies, such as Flex, Flash and Adobe AIR, that you use and develop with every day. There is simply no better opportunity to gain a deep understanding of these technologies. (Mike Chambers - Senior Product Manager)

For those of you who use Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org, there is now an event entry:

http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/235624/

See you there!

Following the purchase of a spangly new Toshiba laptop running Vista, and not one for making life simple, I decided not to run my development environment on IIS7, but rather, I wanted to install the latest version of Apache.

Installing Apache under Windows XP was relatively trivial. This is not the case under Windows Vista. The creation of the Apache service fails, but not overtly. Furthermore, the all-important conf directory can™t be set up by the installer, probably due to user permission problems.

I finally got it working with the following procedure. I used the latest version of Apache (2.2.4) and Windows Vista Business Edition.

1. Uninstall any previous installations of Apache Web server (Start > Control Panel > Programs and Features).
   Make sure that all old Apache folders are also removed (e.g. like C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\…).
2. Turn off your firewall via the Control Panel.
3. Stop User Account Control (UAC).
4. Get the most recent version of Apache from http://httpd.apache.org/ and put it on your desktop, or folder of your choosing. The file I used was called apache_2.2.4-win32-x86-no_ssl.msi, but for ease, it is a good idea to rename the install file to apache.msi.
5. Start > All Programs > Accessories Right-Click Command Prompt and choose œRun as Administrator.
6. Via the command prompt, navigate to the folder in which the apache.msi install file is located.
7. Type msiexec /i apache.msi on the command prompt.

   

8. Run through the Apache installer.

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

9. I™m running it as a development server, so I left the domain as “localhost”.
10. Choose the default server on port 80 for all users option.
11. The default installation directory is C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\, but again for ease, you could change the installation directory to C:\Apache.
12. Reboot your computer.
13. The little Apache feather icon won™t appear on the task bar under Vista with the present version of Apache (2.2.4). To remove the œerror box that says blank or “the operation completed successfully on startup, go to All Programs > Startup, and remove the “Monitor Apache Servers” item there.
14. Browse to http://localhost. It should say “It works!” If it doesn’t, panick, or check your httpd.conf file by going to All Programs > Apache HTTP Server 2.2.x > Configure Apache Server > Test Configuration. Follow the directions for fixing the configuration file.
15. Turn your firewall back on.
16. Turn UAC back on too, if you like to be constantly bugged by control messages!

Good luck!