Silverlight - What's up?
"Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web, desktop, and mobile applications when online or offline." ..
Microsoft Microsoft/b>
Basically "Microsoft Silverlight" is a web application framework that provides functionalities similar to those in Adobe Flash, integrating multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime environment. Initially released as a video streaming plugin, later versions brought additional interactivity features and support for CLI languages and development tools.
The current Version 4 was released on April 12, 2010.
It is compatible with multiple web browser products used on Microsoft Windows, Linux (using Novell(which is another company) Moonlight), and Mac OS X operating systems. Mobile devices, starting with Windows Phone 7 Series and Symbian (Series 60) phones, will likely become supported in 2010.
Silverlight for Linux
A free software implementation named Moonlight, developed by Novell in cooperation with Microsoft, is available to bring compatible functionality to Linux, FreeBSD and other open source platforms.
What does this mean to Flash Developers?
Ok, if you are thinking Silverlight is gonna replace Flash, you probably got to give it another go.Well to us(people who are addicted to C# as their programming tongue, Silverlight just helps us saving the time to get going with ActionScript.Hence Silverlight was just introduced to grab a piece of RIA market by Microsoft).
Adobe Flex
Flex is a framework for building highly interactive, expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. It provides a modern, standards-based language and programming model that supports common design patterns. MXML, a declarative XML-based language, is used to describe UI layout and behaviors, and ActionScript 3, a powerful object-oriented programming language, is used to create client logic.
Google's Cloud Computing
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet.[1][2] Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them.