These are times when there are continual demands for new states. In contrast, the Web is a stateless environment, as you may be aware. In a typical web communication scenario, a request for a resource is made by a client passing a message to the web server, and the messages continue to be sent back and forth between the client and server to conduct the communications necessary to deliver an application, describes Shannon Horn in ‘Microsoft Silverlight 3: A beginner’s guide’ (www.tatamcgrawhill.com).
“The messages that are sent between the client and the server contain simple text. If the messages used to conduct communications over the Web contain only text, how do more complex items such as images, graphs, animations, and multimedia get transported from a web server to a client?”
The answer, as Horn explains, is that all items transported over the Web are first converted to text, then transported over the Web, and then re-created from the text representation of the item into their original form.
“The process of converting a complex item to a text representation is called serialization. To convert an item from a text representation back to the original object is called deserialization.”
Silverlight’s strengths, the author notes, lie in its portability over the Web, being platform agnostic. “Silverlight has many competitive advantages, including its blazing fast rendering engine and performance…”
Apt pick for the techie’s shelf.
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