Thursday, January 08, 2009

Hosting Silverlight Applications on Apache Web Server

My previous posting prompted a reader to ask me why I'm hosting my Silverlight application on IIS on Windows Server 2008. I did not have a good answer for that. I simply chose Windows Server 2008 because I wanted to install Windows 2008 Server and play around in that environment. In retrospect, it was a good first choice as it allowed to build and deploy Silverlight application with the least amount of fuss and configuration. That success encourage me to explore building Silverlight application further.

However, recently I've been investigating this hosting issue more and fortuitously discover Chris Craft's blog entry on hosting Silverlight application. All I needed was to register additional mime types! I immediately went and added the following mime types to my Apache Web Server:

manifestapplication/manifest
.xamlapplication/xaml+xml
.dllapplication/x-msdownload
.applicationapplication/x-ms-application
.xbapapplication/x-ms-xbap
.deployapplication/octet-stream

Now I can run my Silverlight application from an Apache web server! It wasn't until now that I realize that the Silverlight application runs entirely on the client. That means that I no longer need to develop the middle tier with .NET technology and can easily have my Silverlight application interact with a Java middle tier. For work environments that mandate Java middle tier, I can now promote Silverlight as a presentation tier solution.