jquery reduce the adoption of Silverlight? [closed]

Question

Currently looking into learn new technology and silverlight is on the potential list.

However, I was wondering, will the popularity of jquery and it's awesomeness reduce the adoption of silverlight and therefore the need and reward from learning it?

Cheers

Answer 1

There are significant benefits to your user interaction being a first-class web citizen and not trapped in another frame (or dependent on a plugin).

It isn't perfect, but jQuery does remove a lot of the barriers to rapidly coding cross-browser javascript which can replicate many of the features that might encourage a developer to turn to Flash or Silverlight.

This is another instance of choosing the right tool for the right problem, but javascript's access to everything in the DOM and its ability to gracefully degrade make it a pretty versatile tool, and a great framework like jQuery (that removes much of the programming pain) just helps it to be even more so.

Answer 2

While my answer is no, jQuery hasn't affected my decision to adopt Silverlight, I also want to say that I never even considered Silverlight for the times where I chose to use jQuery.

I believe they are suited to different uses - jQuery allows rapid manipulation of the DOM and Silverlight sets up its own environment. So if I wanted to do something that a BROWSER would not let me do, I would use Silverlight: i.e. draw on a canvas (yes, I know about the browser canvas - but really?? that's no comparison to WPF) or stream video in a nice player, or open multiple concurrent connections.

jQuery is a nicer API than the existing browser DOM API. And that's its usefulness. But I wouldn't compare it to Silverlight because it's like comparing a kitchen to a whole house.