ActiveX Document Redux?
I had read about them in the context of ClickOnce deployment, which may ultimately be a great way to deploy desktop apps through the browser, but XBAP is a relative newcomer. I say relative, because, as Scott Hanselman points out, this smells a lot like ActiveX Documents, with the exception that XBAPs do run in Firefox (but not on FF Mac/Linux unless the Mono guys can crack that nut).
Turning The Pages 2.0: a Live XBAP Example
Anyway, I was really impressed by an amazing example of an XBAP in the application created by the British Library:
Turning The Pages 2.0
http://www.bl.uk/ttp2/ttp1.html
Just this morning I was zooming in on a hand-written copy of Jane Austen's "History of England" (which she wrote when she was 13!), and the experience was a little surreal, as was viewing and turning the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Arundel. It felt a little like turning the pages of the books in Myst game series, except these are real books.
Please note that this is not Silverlight (formerly known as WPF/E), this is an actual, full-blown .NET WPF application running in your browser, and the system requirements are commensurate with those technologies.
It's certainly worth checking out, but I'm a little skeptical that this is the next big thing in application deployment (just try clicking the back button in your browser when running the application). The requirements may be a little heavy too, but it definitely opens up some new doors, and machines will hopefully keep up with the demands of these new flavors of applications (WPF, XBPAP, etc.).
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