Seadragon AJAX – DeepZoom without Microsoft Silverlight
I am pretty much sure you know what is DeepZoom and that it requires Silverlight as a platform. But what if you don’t use Silverlight and still want to have coolness of DeepZoom? Meet Seadragon AJAX – written in JavaScript it enables you to add DeepZoom viewer into your blog or website.
Let’s make one thing very clear – I’m huge fan of Silverlight and WPF, not so big on JavaScript. But I am also pragmatic and I understand that some advertisers still choose to wait for a little bit longer before embracing Silverlight fully given its current market share (around 25%). And that truly is a great result for technology that is so new. Also I am aware that on some machines you might not have Silverlight installed – either it is not supporter or not installed yet. And, also I am aware that you would like to use DeepZoom, one of the coolest Silverlight features out there even if you don’t have Silverlight.
Well, in that case you are looking for Seadragon AJAX. It will enable to embed your DeepZoom images into your blog or website without writing a line of code and all you need is support for JavaScript (and I guess support for JS is very, very close do 99,99%).
So, go to http://livelabs.com/seadragon-ajax/ to learn more and start playing.
In case you want to see how it looks and feels, you can play with this example below:
As you can notice, experience is not as smooth and sexy like in Silverlight, but taking into account that is fully written in JavaScript, you will agree that it is awesome!