Comparison between Silverlight and Flex

Flash has been around for many years. Its Applications are mostly limited to flash advertisements, flash games, and flash video players. The applications in RIA are rare. In view of the broad prospects of RIA, Adobe has launched the Flex technology and hopes to make some achievements in RIA. Soon Microsoft launched Silverlight to compete with it. Because of the technical similarity between the two, Flex and Silverlight are often compared (and html5, of course). Here we only make a simple comparison between the two to facilitate the technical route selection.

Flex advantages:

1. Flex comes from Adobe, and graphic image design, processing, and interface rendering are the skills of Adobe. It is not necessary to say that Flex is excellent in interface performance and nobody can do it.

2. Fully implement cross-browser and cross-platform.

3. Flash Player is installed on almost all browsers. The penetration rate of Flash Player is a huge advantage of flex. Users basically do not have to install plug-ins.

Flex disadvantages:

1. In the field of application development, Adobe is still quite unfamiliar. As a script language for processing flash animation, it is good, but it is still difficult to push it into mainstream programming languages, especially it and its weird syntax, it is a combination of Java, C #, and Javascript. Although it does not affect the expression logic, I believe programmers will be confused about it.

2. flex is derived from Flash technology. Flash is designed to expand and supplement regular html pages, which can be easily embedded into pages, but it has low page control capabilities, in system-level Flex development, interaction with pages and browsers cannot be supported! It cannot support interaction between multiple Flex instances!

3. the Flex Framework has some design defects, and there are many bugs in design and implementation, which brings great troubles to development and reduces development efficiency. At the same time, the high and low versions of the Framework cannot be fully compatible, and the control library is not perfect. The Framework maturity needs to be further improved.

4. because Flex uses the "Client/Server" Communication Mode in essence, due to lack of technical support from the server, the client and server are in a heterogeneous language runtime environment, therefore, there are great limitations in data communication. The client and server have a great deal of sales in terms of communication protocols and Data Format Parsing. The full asynchronous communication mode has a low Coupling Degree in functions, high coupling in data format, low development efficiency, and difficult maintenance!

5. Flex is compiled as a binary file (including the mxml for the build interface). It cannot be adjusted flexibly in the future. Any modifications need to be re-compiled and deployed.

6. Flex Development Environment FlexBuilder is based on the Eclipse platform, but there are deficiencies in code editing, syntax check, incremental compilation, and other aspects, resulting in low development efficiency.

 

Advantages of Silverlight:

1. Silverlight is based on the WPF/E technology and has excellent interface performance. Although it is slightly inferior to flex, it can fully meet the needs.

2. Silverlight adheres to the consistent style of the Microsoft Product Family. It provides integrated solutions for programming languages, editors, designers, and system deployment and debugging, which are easy to use.

3. Silverlight uses C # As the development language and can seamlessly interoperate with html and javascript on the page in the browser, which is amazing!

4. Silverlight can be released in binary or xaml labels, making maintenance easier.

5. powerful technical support on the server side, making it very convenient for client-server communication.

Silverlight disadvantages:

1. Silverlight can be cross-browser, but not cross-operating system platform (with moonlight, cross-platform is not a big problem ).

2. The Silverlight penetration rate is low. Generally, You need to download and install the plug-in before the application.

3. The release was late, and there were not many large-scale application development projects.

 

In summary, we can see that the advantages of Flex are basically in interface performance, while the disadvantages are mainly in application development. The advantages of Silverlight lies in the powerful technical support of Microsoft, application Development is very powerful. the disadvantages of Flex are basically the advantages of Silverlight, but the disadvantages of Silverlight are not very obvious. Therefore, for programmers, the two have to compete with each other. Of course, the existing technical accumulation must be taken into account when making the choice. This is also one of the factors that cannot be ignored.

Of course, in the future, the leading role of RIA will be html5, and Silverlight will gradually emerge and be widely used in specific fields. flex will also exist in the graphic image rendering and display field for a long time, I am pessimistic about whether Flex can continue to write the brilliant Flash.