Buzzy And Me

I have been developing on both Flex and Silverlight for some time, and now is as good a time as any to evaluate these two exciting technologies. My goal was to create two similar applications on both Flex and Silverlight. I decided to redo the Stockastica application. It is an online stock trading simulation. Last year it was done using ASP.NET. This year I decided to use the new RIA technologies to dive into the world of Web 2.0.

A word of caution here. I might be slightly biased towards Flex because I have been developing on Flash for quite some time and I find it simply fantastic. Also, I used the Silverlight 2 Beta 1 to build the application. It is obvious that the final release of the product will address some of the issues described here.

I will put up screencasts showing both the applications in action soon.

So, let’s begin…

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 (But Microsoft has Windows update on their side, one ‘Critical Update’ and the problem is solved ).
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. Why? Wasted half an hour on this problem before I realized this.
Even though AS3 is 10 times faster than AS2 (Ask someone who has worked with particle systems), 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.
!!	Get 10 GB of hosting space free with Silverlight streaming. Deliver rich media. Awesome.
Animation is time based.	Animation is frame based. Can’t say which one is better.
Cannot be search engine optimized. Bots can’t read the contents of the SWF file.	I am confused about this after the introduction of the .XAP file.
Deploying the final application is a snap because there is only one SWF file.	Lots of individual files to be deployed.
Got my copy of Flex Builder 3 Pro for free. If you are a student or faculty member of an educational institution, you can too.	Express editions of Visual Studio are available for free.

Those are all the points that come to mind right now. Will update as I find and learn new stuff.

Buzzy