Comments on: Silverlight, Flash as seen by Microsoft

By: jp

jp — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:32:52 +0000

Coming from a java and .net background and making the move to Flex some months ago, I must say I miss the relative ease of development and maturity of tools found in the microsoft environment. The flex community and resources are almost nonexistant in comparison. Finding help, good examples, resources, etc is like pulling teeth in Flex. If you have a common problem, sure you can find 20 people with the same issue, but no one with a common solution. If microsoft makes it easier for developers, I think they will gain a credible advantage and very quickly.

That said, the main draw back to silverlight is the lack of firefox support. With firefox now having a 10% market share, I don´t believe a lot of public web sites will alientate 10% of their market. Silverlight will work for inhouse applications however.

The other advantage I see to flex, is the opensource nature. This should mature the product very rapidly (see gripe number one) and keep it developing quickly. Plus the integration with Media Server and the growing number of open source alternatives helps. Silverlight will have some sort of server backing it, but until pricing is released, who knows.

By: Khaled

Khaled — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:14:11 +0000

Well, Adobe Flash still have a problem with support for Bi-directional Languages like Arabic and Hebrew, Right-to-Left. And this is something solved by Micro$oft long time ago. Adobe seems not to be much interested in fixing this in Flash or they might have a problem in implementing it properly.

Wouldn’t be possible to create a component(or anything similar) to be added to Visual Studio .Net so developers can be able to use any of the .Net languages to develop applications for Flash? — this is just an idea that crossed my mind and not sure of its merit.

By: Thierry

Thierry — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 15:37:19 +0000

@James:
Those are very good points. Thanks for presenting them. They seems obvious to me now, but not before you talked about them.
Thanks!

@wekempf:
I’d will just temper a bit the affirmation you extracted from my post: I don’t think that flash have more developers than .NET, but flash have a bigger community of designers.

Designers are not developers, and developers are often poor designers. Sure, there are good designers that are good developers, but those are like pearls; extremely rare.

.NET is more geared towards a team, with designers and programmers working together to deliver a final product, and I’m not sure that they will outnumber the quantity of flash designer, simply because I think silverlight might attract more medium to big entity, and not that much LLC or “mom based” business.
Those will stay in the field of Flash, in my opinion, at least for the years to come.

Now, neither silverlight nor javaFx (which will be my next post, I’m working on it) are mature products yet.
Both are just draft for the moments, with heavy development being made on the core of those projects in that precise moment, so I don’t think that anybody can predict anything now.
In that view, I don’t think that the ability to run python or ruby code can attract that much peoples and make them throw away years of flash to implement everything in another language, as appealing that this language might be.

But true, Adobe might have to watch closely, and to listen real good about what is important for the peoples that might use their products.
In the end, ease of development, reachability, user base and support will be everything that will motivate the choice.
Both Adobe and Ms are big, strong enterprises that won’t disappear in a couple of months, and it’s not on the reputation of the two that the choice will be made.
At least not if someone with a bit of intelligence have to make that choice.

By: wekempf

wekempf — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:42:50 +0000

You several times made reference to “Flash winning due to the number and quality of developers” (paraphrased, not an exact quote). Thing is, the number of .NET developers far out weighs the number of Flash developers (and I won’t get into a discussion of the quality of the developers in either camp… both have good and bad developers). Further, the multilanguage support of Silverlight gives an advantage to Silverlight as well, because the numerous Python and Ruby developers have some knowledge to bring to the table as well. So, if you’re going to evaluate things solely on the programmer base, I’d say Flash has very little chance. Of course, that’s over simplifying things, but I did so to make my point. In reality, Silverlight does have a hill to climb, but at this point in time it’s Adobe that has to make moves in order to keep it’s dominance in the market.

By: James H

James H — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 09:16:45 +0000

This is a good summary of the situation. Here are some additions and clarifications:

Languages supported:
1. Silverlight already has the multilanguage support of .NET platform.
2. Java(the platform) has many languages implemented but the Java language is the most supported. JavaFX Script is a new scripting language for the platform. (JavaFX Mobile aims to unify APIs for mobile phones and is somewhat tangential to comparisons with Silverlight/Flash, so I won’t mention it more)
3. Flash’s VM is titled “Actionscript VM” (AVM) and only Actionscript(which is really two languages, AS1/2, and AS3) is officially supported with AVM. An alternative open-source language compiling to AVM, haXe, is available. Finally, a tech demo at the recent Adobe MAX conference showed C++ code compiled to run on AVM. We don’t know yet if anything will come of the demo, but it opens many, many possibilities.

Application packaging:
1. I’m not sure exactly what Silverlight offers. I’m sure there’s a browser plugin, and a way to build executable binaries, since the former is a major feature and .NET already does the latter.
2. Java currently offers applets in the browser and Java Web Start outside of it. Java Web Start acts as its own installer/package manager tool. Executable binaries can also be built. JavaFX does nothing new for packaging AFAIK.
3. Flash is a ubiquitous browser plugin, can build executable “projector” files(to a limited number of target platforms), and now has a Java Web Start-like package manager with the AIR system. AIR assists in access to lower-level details of the OS and platform that Flash normally restricts.

UI design:
1. Silverlight supports Microsoft’s touted XAML markup format for interface design.
2. JavaFX Script has the primary goal of UI markup in mind. 3. Flash has two modes of interface design: graphically with the Flash IDE, and using MXML markup with Adobe’s Flex toolkit. Flex aims to be more developer/app-oriented than Flash. Note that both MXML and XAML are XML-based. Don’t know how similar they are, though…

By: Will Holley

Will Holley — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 08:11:20 +0000

Hi Ryan,

My impression is that the future of Silverlight (1.1) is geared more towards building rich client applications of the kind that have been difficult to build in Flash (although this is also changing with Flex2, Air etc). As I see it there are 2 major wins for Silverlight over flash in this area:

1. the support for .NET framework languages as well as JavaScript, (Iron)Python, (Iron)Ruby means that there is a large amount of code out there that you can port into you apps.

2. You have all the tooling for .NET at your disposal – visual studio, expression tools, all the testing tools / frameworks, ability to use continuous integration etc that as far as I’m aware are generally lacking in the flash world.

That said, Silverlight 1.1 is still in alpha and theres a lot missing and unknown about how the process of developing rich client apps in it will work.

By: Thierry

Thierry — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 11:04:34 +0000

Thanks Ryan.
I have to admit I’m pretty impressed to have caught your attention. And a bit proud that you call it a “really good writeup”.
As I said in my post, I’ll keep looking about this silverlight/javaFx gig, and I’ll continue to comment my views on it.

And if I had any questions about Flash that I could not find an answer, you will hear of me.

And by the way, sorry for all those spellings errors.
I was really horrified when I proof readed this post this morning.
Note to self, don’t publish a post at 3am, it’s a __BAD__ idea…

By: Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 23:25:31 +0000

Really good writeup. I’m not sure we have an “answer” to Silverlight but we’ve been putting some new stuff in the Flash Player like support for H.264 video. If you have any questions, let me know.

=Ryan
rstewart@adobe.com