Using MVC to create a rich UI app [closed]

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We currently have a silverlight application which is basically a content management system. The developer who developed it has left and we have found that the architecture is very complex even to do simple things.

The reason we went for Silverlight was to get a rich UI and to not have page refreshes as management wanted to give the impression of an application running rather than pages fetched from a server.

We are thinking about creating an MVC app but the page refresh may be an issue for management.

I was wondering whether we could use a master page which will have the main options (a navigation pane) and we could us AJAX and insert UI views (generated from actions) into portions of the page. In this way, the master page will not be refreshed but the portions of page will be upd开发者_StackOverflow社区ated with new views.

Would this work?

Also there seems to be a lot of JQuery UI widgets which may give me a Rich UI but I doubt I could get the UI to look as good as a silverlight UI. Or am I wrong here?

JD

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You are wrong. jQuery + ajax is lovely.

Update

Since @yakimych asked very nicely, here is an update.

You're question is very broad and a bit subjective which makes it hard to provide an accurate answer.

It's quite possible to create a flashy UI with jquery and it's easy to update parts of an page with ajax/jquery. It all boils down to whether a dependency to silverlight is OK or not + if the developers have jquery or xaml experience. Do you have MVC experience? It's a bit harder than webforms but a lot more flexible and a better fit when working with ajax/jquery.

You should also ask yourself if it's OK to have a silverlight environment for a CMS which should generate proper HTML. Isn't it like saying "HTML is not good enough for us, we need to use a cool plugin to create web pages while you puny users should stick to HTML".

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To add to what @jgauffin already said, you can indeed create polished UI web apps these days with HTML + jQuery + Ajax.

You might need to get yourself up to speed with these technologies but they are very powerful.

This learning curve might not be very different from that you need to learn in order to create good Silverlight applications since in order to develop Silverlight apps you need to learn the MVVM pattern, get used to request everything asynchronously, learn XAML, et cetera. There is nothing wrong with these technologies but there is a lot to learn if you want to do it right which is no different from learning a lot to do HTML + jQuery + Ajax right.

Personally I would go for the HTML + jQuery + Ajax route but you'll need to decide what's the best approach for your solution.