Thursday, June 18, 2009

Ajax vs Flex vs Silverlight vs Other

HTML 5 has been causing a real stir in the RIA community recently. There has been a rise in "Flash Killer" articles and blog posts. I guess everybody has a right to their own opinion. The problem I have with nearly all of these stories is what they choose to compare. You can't just compare Flex to Silverlight for example because they're composite platforms. A more accurate comparison would be Flash Player vs Silverlight Runtime. Nearly every Flex vs Silverlight article I've read treats Flash and Flex as one entity and it's not. Here is a list of what I believe to be valid comparisons.

Flash Player vs Sliverlight Runtime
Flex SDK vs Silverlight SDK
Flash + Ajax vs Flash + Flex SDK

One comparison I would like to see more of is the Flash + Ajax vs Flash + Flex SDK. How does Ajax compare to Flex when you allow the use of Flash to fill the gaps in Ajax. When working with Ajax applications there is nothing wrong with using Flash just were you need it. I have recently discovered Ext JS and so far my experience has been alot better but only time will tell. I'm about to port a large Flex application to Ext JS :)