The entire application is dowloaded, not a single screen. When you create a
SL project in VS you get a resulting .XAP file in the
ClientBin directory. That is a .zip file, only with a .xap extension.
That is even worse than what I was originally thinking. This is a
deployment nightmare. How would you deploy a simple field label change to a
screen? Sounds like I would have to package up the entire app and each user
would have to download it.
Using web services to put and get data to the server is all the rage now as
the way to design apps.
There are so many approaches to this (i.e. web services from client to
server), it is really impossible to critique. In reality a 5250 session is
doing exactly what we are calling "all the rage". It is sending user events
and business data back and forth to the server. The more open and flexible
that communication is (i.e. XML+SOAP+XAML+xyz) the more sluggish it will
be. There is a reason there are initiatives to do XML compression and
replace SOAP style services with RESTful - they over architected the first
round, and guess who was leading that pack of inventing SOAP? Microsoft.
In short, XML web services are not the answer for black box applications
where you own all ends of the spectrum (i.e. the UI and the controller and
the DB). Many are using XML web services as a default because that is the
safe decision to make right now. In reality you shouldn't really ever be
using XML web services other than to communicate with an entity where you
can't control their code.
The more you describe SL the more it increases my dislike of it.
Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com
http://mowyourlawn.com/blog/
midrange.com
