Microsoft Silverlight 4 vs. Adobe Flash 10.1 379
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the there-could-be-only-one dept.
from the there-could-be-only-one dept.
superapecommando writes "The richest RIA platforms today (and for the foreseeable future) come from clashing titans Adobe and Microsoft, whose Flash and Silverlight platforms both combine excellent tools for developers and designers, broad client support, strong support for server-side technologies, digital rights management capabilities, and the ability to satisfy use cases as varied as enterprise dashboards, live video streaming, and online games. And each has spawned new updates, to Flash 10.1/AIR 2 and Silverlight 4 respectively, which put them on a near-level playing field. Which one should you choose?"
WebGL (Score:3, Interesting)
Ummm ... how are either of the above better than WebGL + natively JIT compiled Javascript ?
Re:Both feed on developers (Score:3, Interesting)
Given the prices they are asking
There exists free software to produce rich Internet applications for all three platforms: Flash Player, Silverlight, and HTML5. Yes, you do need a Windows license to test your RIA properly, but if you rely on your web site to pay for food and rent in a developed country, $300 every three years is chump change.
Better for the community to seek and develop Open Source Solutions with equivalent functionality
You mean like haXe and Gnash for Flash Player, MonoDevelop and Moonlight for Silverlight, and Firefox with developer extensions for HTML5?
Re:Chrome Frame install base, or lack thereof (Score:3, Interesting)
Also to add that most Modern Commercial Web developers are more concerned about having computability across browsers then any Open vs closed standard. Being that Microsoft is dragging on HTML 5 support most will stay with flash as it will do what they need functionally. While supporting and working with 99.99% of the user base.
Flash works for Linux, Windows, Mac, and even for some other Unixes (how ever may not be the most updated). And for IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari. All in all a good choice.
Silverlight, I would avoid it as it isn't that much better then flash, and I see it as more of an ActiveX replacement then a Flash Replacement where it will run on the more controlled internal networks.
HTML 5 has promise and I am actually doing a lot of research into it. As it will be soon fully supported by the wider market. However it will not replace Flash and Silverlight but it will replace a lot of the need of Flash and Sliverlights basic features, which is good too. As we shouldn't need to work on a new platform just for vector graphics.
Re:JavaFX (Score:5, Interesting)
Java's layout managers are pretty atrocious ... the gridbag layout managed to achieve a state of sadomasochistic perfection that hasn't been seen since the Middle Ages when plague victims would whip themselves for thinking God was mad at them. But the whole state of UI developing is nightmarish. Whenever I nested layers upon layers of layout managers, I felt like an ancient Incan, setting traps in a tomb for any poor suckers wishing to alter my application UI. Of course, that poor sucker was usually me.
In any case, some dude actually realized the insanity of the process and wrote his own layout manager called Mig Layout [miglayout.com] which puts an end to nesting and actually makes sense. Dare I say easy? I rewrote my last app in it and never turned back. Give it whirl although keep the retard with the bat around just in case.
Re:Alien Versus Predator (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the assumption sideline-commenting non-designer coders who aren't in the web or multimedia industry make, like a lot of guys here in Slashdot who do mostly non-frontend stuff. Until then, don't expect Flash to vanish anytime soon.
Same case goes for HTML5. Without proper authoring tools for the non-programmer layman, don't expect any other tech to knock off Flash from its perch. Nothing comes close to the Flash Professional authoring tool's ability for creating vector animations and integrating motion, sound and interactivity with ease today.
Even then, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch announced that Adobe would be the 1st one to build the same kind of tools for HTML5. In fact, they've already built HTML5 + CSS3 support for Dreamweaver [adobe.com].
As for video, there's a good reason Flash exploded on the net long before it had the capability to play videos, so don't expect alternative video players to end it either.
Heck, I heard even Blizzard used Flash for certain parts of Starcraft 2's UI. [citation needed]
Re:To appease the most visitors with ease (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Neither (Score:3, Interesting)
Fine, HTML 5. HTML 5 is great, we can all agree on that. Now which video codec?
Flash provides DRM
Silverlight provides DRM.
HTML5 does not provide DRM.
The codec is the one with DRM, so that rules out H.264, Theora, and WebM. Got any in mind?
Re:Comparing Apples to Rocks (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny, I have only ever had a handful of issues with the netflix player, and those I'm pretty sure were attributed to other aspects of the machine (likely a temperature related failure).
Jumping over to Flash though, to watch the Daily Show, or anything through Boxie or Hulu, I get choppy play back, or the video drops out, or I have to try to skip ahead a second after the player hangs coming back from a commercial. Total pain in the ass. My favorite is when the Flash player crashes the tab in IE8, so IE tries to restore the tab, which fires up the Flash player, that crashes the tab... and the cycle continues until I bring up the task manager and kill IE. Pure win.
The MLB jump was totally expected. At that point they were using SL2, which was really SL1.1 with a name change so people wouldn't associate it with SL1, that used an entirely different system (SL1 was basically a XAML rendering plug in that depended on JS for everything). SL2 was the first iteration of SL to use the Silverlight Framework (a trimmed down version of the .Net framework).
It was too much, too early. And I would expect the exact same failure if the MLB attempted to make the same transition to Flash version 2 or to HTML5 today. They would have been much, much better off waiting for another year and getting SL3 out, THEN trying to crack into the bigger markets.
-Rick
Re:Absolutely (Score:0, Interesting)
Your availability stats are way, way out of date - ATM, Flash penetration is about 96%, Silverlight penetration is around 62%. => http://www.riastats.com/
To answer the original question: we'll need a lot more information than what is provided. As far as features are concerned, I'd say Flash & Silverlight are on par with eachother, with probably a slight advantage for Silverlight. I'd say the choice highly depends on what the developers in your company are used to developing in right now: if you're already using the .NET stack, you'd be crazy to go for Flash (ActionScript). The nice thing about Silverlight is that you program it in C# + XAML, and that it's not just a "web tech": MS' strategy is centered around the "one technology, 3 screens" paradigm, meaning: learn XAML + C#, and you'll be able to develop for desktop (either WPF or Silverlight), web (Silverlight) or the new Win 7 mobile series (Silverlight).
I've programmed in Java, C#, ActionScript, and of course some regular HTML/CSS/Javascript - and I really, really do prefer C# together with XAML at the moment. As long as you stay in the MS stack, all the libs, techs, ... fit nicely together, from DB layer through service layer right up to your presentation layer. I'm currenly a project manager in a big ICT company, and we notice the cost of the same project built in Java vs .NET is about 1/3 higher when built using Java - that's a huge amount of money, keeping in mind the size of our projects. When comparing Flex projects vs Silverlight projects (the RIA apps, not the desktop apps), the cost is about the same when working with an existing service layer / DB (typically an Oracle DB), but when you're developing from scratch, same logic applies: stay in the MS stack, and your costs will go down significantly.
So really, it's up to the requirements of your app, the environment you're building it on and the experience of your developers.
Re:Silverlight for in-house and Flash/Flex for oth (Score:2, Interesting)
Different tools for different jobs. This is the first post that isn't some rant about [Evil Empire | Flash Vulnerability | Linux Support]. The truth is never as polarized as people want it to be.
Mod the parent up, please.
Silverlight 4 only supports Microsoft Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
For those who don't read subject line:
Silverlight 4 only 'runs' on Microsoft Windows. Moonlight goes as far as supporting Silverlight 2.0 specs, and even that is flaky - no DRM support (don't bitch about it to me, bitch about it to content developers deploying it), some parts of API is missing, codecs have to be downloaded manually and more funk. Compare that to Flash Player, a similar and similarly abused technology, but one which works on most platforms today without a lot of funky quirks. I would know, I write Flash Player applications on Ubuntu.
In a nutshell: Silverlight is not even in the same league as Flash, as far as adoptance and platform support is concerned. Microsoft is also out of touch with reality and it is my opinion that they should not be depended upon when it comes to "enriching" the Web, but I have elaborated on this before, so I am not going to repeat myself.
In fact the whole article sounds (didn't say it in fact is) like someones desperate pitch to bring peoples attention back to Silverlight, as if it is already forgotten. Which it should be, because there is at least one wrong thing with it - the abovementioned platform support, which I believe will not catch up anyway. Things just go too fast these days, if you are not on top after a year, scrap it and redirect dire resources elsewhere.
Re:Alien Versus Predator (Score:3, Interesting)
whoa. hold on there.
you're saying we have crappy GUI webapps, and the reason they are so crappy is because a designer (ie a non-coder) created them and not a programmer.
If there's one thing I know, its this: Never let a programmer create any form of GUI.
In an ideal world, we'd have design separate from the code... but then, in that same world we'd have de-coupled GUIs from applications, and DB code in the DB, written by DBAs!
Re:Silverlight 4 only supports Microsoft Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Silverlight 4 only 'runs' on Microsoft Windows.
No, it also runs on Mac OS X.
And Linux? The global stats for desktop Linux users on the web are still on the order of 1%. Of course, it may be different for a particular task - you may be writing an internal app for an all-Linux shop, for example - but it's certainly not a reasonable argument for most scenarios.