FLEX VS SILVERLIGHT
Today i have found some intresting difference between flex and silverlight.These differences made my mind clear why we need to prefer flex over silverlight.HERE ARE THE DIFFERENCES
| FLEX | SILVERLIGHT |
| Almost everyone has Flash Player 9 installed on their systems. So there are no extra downloads required to view these apps. | Installing the Silverlight 1.0 plugin was a hassle for me. Then the upgrade to the 2.0 version was not as seamless as I had expected. Almost no one has the Silverlight plugin |
| Flex has a rich control library ready for use. | Even in Beta 1, many controls are missing. Though I expect this problem to be solved by the final release of the product. |
| Supports all image formats. | Does not support the GIF format. |
| Even though AS3 is 10 times faster than AS2 it still cannot compare with the power of C#. Also, can only program in AS3. | Very powerful and easy to use. You can use JavaScript, VB.NET and C#. |
| Linux support | No Linux support. That’s just wrong. |
| Databinding is a snap with the [Bindable] tag. | Not as straightforward, but can be done anyway. Also, more powerful(in my opinion). |
| Data transfer via the proprietary AMF using WebORB, Fluorine, etc is faster than traditional web services. | No such format for data transfer. Will have to stick to SOAP and REST web services(for now). |
| BlazeDS, the real time data push and remoting platform is open source. Very exciting. | Did not find much information about this. |
| Styling is simplified by using CSS to style your components. Implementation is not complete though. Stuff like background-repeat is a glaring omission. | Have to use XAML resources. Found this unfamiliar. |
| Debugging is a bit of a hassle. | Debugging using Visual Studio is very easy. |
| Accessing web services requires manual creation of ActionScript proxy classes. You can automate this by using FlexTense though. | Accessing web services is very easy. Just add a reference to the WebService in Visual Studio and lookup reference.cs for the good stuff |
| Size of the compiled SWF file is smaller than that of the uncompressed Silverlight component. | Size of the Silverlight component is larger. |
| Animation is time based. | Animation is frame based. Can’t say which one is better. |
| Flash is exist from many years and have strong acceptance in market. | Silverlight is new in market and required time to get acceptance in market. |
| Flash allows creating XML Socket object. | Socket programming is not possible. |
| Lots of individual files to be deployed. | Deploying the final application is a snap because there is only one SWF file. |
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