Flex vs. Silverlight | The Coffeehouse

nightski

I have been diving pretty heavily into WPF lately, and I do really enjoy it. With Silverlight 2.0 on the horizon, its even more compelling.

However I am not ignorant to what is happening with Flex/Air and the other platforms coming out. In fact, searches on dice.com return results in the thousands for flex/air, but only low hundreds for silverlight/wpf. Are there any Flex developers here? How do the platforms compare? Is Flex a joy to work with - or the opposite? Just looking for some opinions.

JChung2006

Flash is a more mature platform than Silverlight, but you can't count on that lasting long, given Microsoft's history. It's on a lot more people's machines than Silverlight is. If you want to try it out without paying Adobe premium prices for their tools, you could always give Aptana a try.

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

nightski wrote:
In fact, searches on dice.com return results in the thousands for flex/air, but only low hundreds for silverlight/wpf.

Google has ~266,000 results for flex/air but over 1,450,000 results for Silverlight.

Note that while Silverlight and wpf have a lot in common, they are conceptually different when developing apps. You either develop a WPF application (client, for Windows) or a Silverlight application (for the web). Consequently Silverlight/WPF will get fewer results, since they are usually treated seperately.

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

creditcard wrote:
I think Silverlight is better compared to Flash then Flex/Air. AIR for instance, is a proper and real development framework. Silverlight is... a browser plugin. Silverlight honestally is crap, I have yet to see it used anywhere except Microsoft sites and Ice Cube's website (lol) and even MSFT uses Flash more then Silverlight. Both are crap in my opinion, but Silverlight is crap that no one gives a crap about, apperently.

If you stop swearing long enough to look past your own fanatical hatred of Microsoft, you might see that Silverlight has only just seriously appeared on the scene for developers with VS 2008, and that Silverlight is only just being taken up because development is not instantaneous for all but the smallest of projects.

Despite this, you'll find that a number of significant developments are taking place with Silverlight, such as Fox Entertainment, MSNBC's 2008 election special, NBC's 2008 exclusive olympics coverage, and the BBC's live internet streaming concerts etc.

jamie

which ever one finally puts 12 options for saving, embedding, copying, screen-capturing on the right mouse flyout- is the winner.

Toronto Ontario, Canada

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ryanstewart

Just to add some clarification. Flex is a framework. You can use it to build either AIR (desktop) applications or applications inside of teh browser. It just runs on top of the Flash Player so any Flex application can run as a browser app. In that sense, it's very close to Silverlight. It's just that AIR adds a desktop component to Flex *kind* of like XAML can be used to create either Silverlight or WPF applications but not exactly. Flex is also open source so you can use any tool you want to build it and just grab the free SDK. =Ryan rstewart@adobe.com

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

jamie wrote:

which ever one finally puts 12 options for saving, embedding, copying, screen-capturing on the right mouse flyout- is the winner.

Toronto Ontario, Canada

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Jing Project.

It's not right-mouse click, but it's close.

Plus, it's not free, they have a subsription model, hosting your caps for something like $6 / month.

stevo_
Human after all

Oh please, market share aside..

Flex is a terrible platform, just as flash is.. actionscript 3 might be a big change from actionscript 2, but its still horribly messy.. lots of very poor architecture design.. poor developer/designer tools..

MXML vs XAML again, xaml just humiliates mxml..

It's really pretty impressive how much nicer silverlight 1.0 was to 'flash 10.0'... and it's only set to improve even more with 2.0..

The only arguments in this are about marketshare, the latest flash player is on 95% of machines where as silverlight is so far mostly unheard of..

But if it's implementation is an area with a limited set of users, then I don't see why you wouldn't pick silverlight over flash..

nightski

Good input so far. I probably shouldn't have included the dice data, as it doesn't mean very much (search C# and you get 8k results). I intend to stick with WPF/Silverlight. I was just hoping to learn a little more about what the Adobe Flex platform was.

So, what I have concluded so far -

Flex is like Silverlight. Air is like ClickOnce for Flex.

I downloaded the free tool mentioned earlier and will probably play around with it a bit (thanks for the link).

esoteric
λ

That's a pretty stupid query, evildictaitor. Try 5,240,000 results when searching for Adobe Flex. Adobe "Air" is a new codename, afaik, for the AVM2 VM, or was that "Apollo". Impressively, searching for that, it gives me 9,240,000 results, even more results than the older Flex term. Adobe Flash gives 44,000,000 results whilst Macromedia Flash gives 96,900,000 results.

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

creditcard wrote:
I think Silverlight is better compared to Flash

Quoted for Annoyance factor. Still, it's funny.

To be honest, as both are relatively lightweight and easy for the user to install, I don't see that this is going to be a big head-to-head battle. In much the same way that .NET hasn't killed, and won't be killed by, Java. everyone will just use whichever they prefer and users will have them all side-by-side.

esoteric
λ

Noone has to pay for developing to Flash. You can just use haXe compiler which targets both Neko/NekoVM, Javascript & Flash bytecode (AVM, AVM2). Maybe it'll also target CIL in the future, who knows...

neurich

creditcard wrote:

Yeah kind of like how you use JavaScript for logic in Silverlight. At least with Flash the logic is compiled into bytecode and executed in a VM, which makes it much more performant. Not so with Silverlight.

Silverlight is basically a properitary implementation of <canvas>. Ironically even Miguel himself contended that Silverlight is a joke, and recommended using Flash: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2007/Apr-20.html

What do you think Silverlight 2.0 does? Go and learn about the platform and make sensible comparisons between them before flaming without regard.

creditcard wrote:

Note that my post has nothing to do with Silverlight 2, or 3 or 4 and 25 which will fix all the problems with Silverlight. Right now Silverlight is crap, can't hold a candle to Flash on performence, features, install base, flexability, cross platform support, and ease of programming. If you think otherwise you are living in a dreamworld. It's been out for over a 1 year evildictator, and it's been out of beta for months. So has Expression Blend. So don't give me that crap.

Did you play with Flash when it was at the same maturity level as Silverlight? I did, the experience sucked. Each platform has their strengths, simply because Flash has been around for a while doesn't mean that new technology/thinking won't knock it off its perch. Remember what Google did to Yahoo?

Cloudmaster

It's very simple. Silverlight and Flex are two different platforms/frameworks/whatever. They will continue to borrow from each other and drive each others evolution. There will also be other players down the road; such as Google and - maybe - IBM, or even Sun (Oracle). Nobody will win. Becasue it is not a competition. It's an evolution in technology. embrace it and grow from it, while making some $$$. So, go ahead, and learn to master both, for you must conquer the RIA Web 3.0 space.

Thought: Wouldn't it be cool to use a Silverlight movie inside a Flash Player; and vice versa. Web Mashups are knocking at our door.

Cheers my fellow developers.

Cloudmaster - out.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

In reply to Cloudmaster

#Oct 8th @ 12:47 PM

Can we have threads lock after 1 year or something? These necro-threads are becoming a nuisance.

This place is about conversation, and these necros remind me of Data in Star Trek: Generations...when he was laughing at a joke he heard 8 years before.