CoreFrame: Frontend Migration from Silverlight to HTML5
Services
Business Consulting
Custom Software
Industries
Custom Software
Period
Oktober 2014 - Dezember 2015
The RADFramework (Rapid Application Development) is a model-driven development platform for master data and business process applications. Through metadata annotations (Specifier), entities with properties, associations, and behaviors can be defined — the framework automatically generates user interfaces, persistence layers, and service interfaces from these definitions.
The original user interface was based on Microsoft Silverlight — a technology that increasingly lost relevance with the advent of HTML5 and mobile devices. The migration to HTML5 and JavaScript was critical for the framework's future viability and compatibility with modern browsers and devices.
At the core of the new frontend architecture is an MVVM implementation (Model-View-ViewModel) based on KnockoutJS for declarative data binding and RequireJS for modular dependency management. The existing UI patterns — ListView for overviews, SummaryView for previews, and DetailView for detail views — were fully migrated to the new technology. The RADFramework's service architecture enables seamless communication between the new JavaScript frontend and the existing C#/.NET backend.
The migration preserved full functionality while improving performance and usability. The new platform-independent architecture also provided the technical foundation for the development of the WebCMS — a novel content management system as an extension of the RADFramework.
Credits
Technologies