A propos de Volta et Silverlight...

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french_flag_iconVous n'êtes peut-être pas familiers avec le projet Volta. En deux mots, Volta est une sorte de "recompilateur" qui permet aux développeurs et aux architectes de déplacer des portions de traitement d'une application entre les clients et le serveur, après qu'elles aient été conçues et écrites.

logo-voltaLes premières démonstrations de Volta ont montré une recompilation de code MSIL vers Javascript pour déployer du code vers un client browser web. Jusque là, on pouvait en effet s'interroger sur l'avenir d'un tel outil, et aussi au passage sur la santé mentale des personnes ayant produit la chose ;)

A la lumière d'un billet récent publié par l'équipe de Volta, tout devient limpide, et l'idée est tout bonnement brillante :

"So, the most obvious case is Silverlight 2.0 as the client tier and a web server as the server tier... This is a great scenario since Volta can split IL to IL without having to resort to IL translation to, say, JavaScript (which has gotten too much attention). Further, execution contexts such as XNA, WinForms, DHTML, SVG, VML, even SQL are realistic client targets (tiers) for Volta. Then there's the notion of a local "distributed" system (think of applications running on a single client as the tiers) where Volta also makes sense as a means of easily composing the system."

uk_flag_iconYou may not be familiar with the Project Volta. Basically, Volta is a recompiler that allows developers and architects to distribute portions of an application between the client and the server after it's been written.

The first demos and articles about Volta revealed a tool that recompiles portions of MSIL code into Javascript to allow displacing code from the server to the client browser. At this point, one could wonder about the future of this weird technology, and also abotu the mental health of it's genitors :)

Considering Volta in the light of a recent post on the Project Volta team blog, it suddenly becomes crystal clear, even brilliant:

"So, the most obvious case is Silverlight 2.0 as the client tier and a web server as the server tier... This is a great scenario since Volta can split IL to IL without having to resort to IL translation to, say, JavaScript (which has gotten too much attention). Further, execution contexts such as XNA, WinForms, DHTML, SVG, VML, even SQL are realistic client targets (tiers) for Volta. Then there's the notion of a local "distributed" system (think of applications running on a single client as the tiers) where Volta also makes sense as a means of easily composing the system."