Project Silk

Project Silk provides guidance for building maintainable cross-browser web applications that are characterized by an intentional design, rich interactivity, and a responsive user interface (UI). The result is an immersive and engaging user experience (UX). Such applications take advantage of the latest web standards, including HTML5, CSS3, and ECMAScript version 5, and modern web technologies such as jQuery and ASP.NET MVC 3. The concepts explained in this book are demonstrated via a real-world customer-facing web application called the Mileage Stats Reference Implementation (Mileage Stats). Mileage Stats allows users to track and compare their vehicles’ fuel efficiency, usage, and operating costs, and to schedule vehicle maintenance reminders. The image below shows the Mileage Stats client-side objects and their implementation mapped to libraries or frameworks. Building a rich web application that reduces the number of full-page loads, includes animations, and is responsible for updating the UI dynamically requires a thoughtful approach to managing structure, modularity, communication, navigation, and data. This book details how the Project Silk team designed Mileage Stats and solved a number of challenges. This guidance is intended for web developers and assumes you have some hands-on experience with ASP.NET MVC, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and jQuery.