From Coldfusion to Silverlight

I built a comprehensive site with ColdFusion that covers the following areas: handles multiple databases, present data on maps, control different login privileges, accepts and track users' requests, send automatic emails alerts. what is the easiest and fastest way to convert the site to Silverlight, keeping in mind that most of my background is in ColdFusion? How long wowould it take to get familiar with the language and convert all the pages. also, I'm hosting the current application on godady, wocould I be able to host how the new application there?

 

First off, not everything you mention makes sense to convert ot Silverlight. silverlihgt is a client-side only technology so things like database access, User tracking and sending email are beyond the capabilities of Silverlight, and always will be (probably ). what might make sense though is to split your application into two (or more) pieces with Silverlight handling all user interaction and some other technology, even cold fusion, handling all of the back-end processes.

 

For instance, database access. one possible solution wocould be for you to use your existing cold fusion database access code but instead of generating a Web page with the results of your db cils, expose them as a Web service that is used by the Silverlight application. then the Silverlight app wocould call that service with whatever parameters are needed and when it returns wocould display the data to the user in a friendly way.

 

As to the learning curve question, most developers pick up the basics of Silverlight pretty quickly since C # Is a pretty robust language that has been around for a while now. there is also a pretty active developer community through this forum and a number of blogs to explain things in detail.

 

Godaddy can host Silverlight apps just fine, the hosting question will just be in relation to whatever server-side technology to go with and it sounds like cold-fusion is fine.

 

Did this help you at all?

 

From a previous user of cold fusion, I 'd say it's kinda different. be prepared to learn a lot of new principles and "modern" programming concepts. cold fusion, from what I remember was pretty much made for early interactive web pages. it's barely a programming language relative to "real" language. i'm sure some of your functions are server side and can be implemented in. net in IIS as well if you so need. maybe you can save most of it even and make some interface to it that will work. but I 'd have to say the cold fusion to Silverlight (and. net) is a big jump in learning curve. I 'd say that the easiest way is to build it from ground up by learning what Sl does. i'm not sure you can find that much "Direct mapping" of code that you can easily translate from one language to another.

 

However, I used it quite a while ago and it was mostly geared toward accessing databases. I see that they have updated it a bit so maybe it's different now.