Microsoft Corp on Wednesday released a preview version of a programming tool set called Volta that it said is being designed to take away some of the pain of developing Web and rich Internet applications.
According to Microsoft, Volta is closely tied to the vendor’s .Net Framework development platform and is compatible with its Visual Studio development tools. The new tool set includes a so-called declarative tier-splitting capability that lets developers easily move code back and forth between the server and client pieces of an application, said Alex Daley, group product manager at Microsoft’s Live Labs division.
“You can start by building your app to run on the client, but then for performance reasons, you can easily move part of the code back to the server any time during the development process,” Daley said. That gives developers “fine-grained control” over the performance of programs and can help speed up development and debugging while minimizing the amount of recoding that needs to be done, he added.
Daley claimed that the tier-splitting capability provides an advantage over conventional AJAX development, which relies on client-side code written in JavaScript and server-side code written in C# or via Microsoft’s ASP.Net development environment, which supports multiple languages.
Because the AJAX approach requires the use of different languages at the client and server levels, developers “spend most of their time building what we would consider boilerplate [code]," Daley said. "It's also virtually impossible to debug the two different experiences."
Volta will work with Microsoft's upcoming Visual Studio 2008 development suite and can be used to build applications in any of the numerous languages that are supported within the .Net Framework. That includes JavaScript, although Daley noted that such code must go through an extra step before it can be executed.
In addition, Volta can be used along with Microsoft's .Net Common Language Runtime engine and its SilverLight media player software to build rich Internet applications that should be able to run within both the Internet Explorer and Firefox Web browsers.
Daley said that for now, Volta can't be used by developers who are working with Adobe System Inc.'s Adobe Integrated Runtime software, an upcoming rival to Microsoft's technologies. But, he added, the lack of AIR support may change in the future.
Source:- http://www.computerworld.com
