Silverlight

DevForce Silverlight allows you to deliver line of business applications in the browser with the kind of responsiveness users expect from a desktop application. Developed for Microsoft Silverlight, the browser plug-in which powers rich internet applications, it allows you to leverage your existing application development experience with new tools and techniques to build serious applications for the web.

A few things to note about Silverlight:

• Silverlight is inherently n-tier. The client application executes in a sandbox on the browser, and must communicate with a service to retrieve and save data. The DevForce Silverlight Business Object Server (BOS) provides that service, and allows you quickly to have a Silverlight application retrieving and saving to a database, using the domain model and business objects you're already familiar with.
  
  
• Silverlight is inherently asynchronous. To avoid blocking the browser, Silverlight requires that all service communications be performed asynchronously. This can be a bit challenging at first, but DevForce Silverlight provides an asynchronous API very similar to the standard synchronous API, plus additional features (like client-side caching) to make asynchronous programming as easy as possible.

In DevForce Silverlight, an EntityManager holds the client-side entity cache and communicates with the BOS, just like it does in other DevForce applications. The Domain Model is shared between the two environments, and DevForce handles the movement of your business objects between tiers. You use the standard EntityQuery syntax to build true LINQ queries, which can be directed against a back-end data source or against the local DevForce cache. Your queries run asynchronously against back-end data sources, or synchronously against the local cache.

Key to it all is the shared domain model. The domain model used by the Silverlight application is the same domain model used on the server, and can be shared with other DevForce applications (e.g. with WPF, WinForms, or ASP.NET). You can add business logic - via custom methods and properties, DevForce property interceptors, and DevForce verification - to your shared domain model. You can also choose to deploy logic which is applicable to the client-side or server-side only.