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Adobe Flex vs Silverlight

Asked 2009-06-14T08:27:15.350
14

This is not a pure technical question, but I believe answers will help the RIA community.

We are a software development company working on development of a stock trading product. We chose to use Adobe Flex (in mid of 2008) due to its browser penetration and its maturity relative to Silverlight. We already developed the system, and we are quite happy with it.

Now we are planning to launch the second version of our product, and it will feature a much more advanced user interface -- basically a framework of dockable windows and panes as in Visual Studio 2005 and onward, etc. We searched on the internet and found that the market of 3rd party components for Adobe Flex is still very small, but for Microsoft's Silverlight there are many advanced 3rd party components available e.g. data grids, docking frameworks, etc.

When can we expect the same type of components in Adobe Flex? What do experts think if we develop to the new version of Silverlight (Expertise in Adobe Flex vs. Silverlight is not an issue at the moment, assuming we have to develop everything from scratch).

The launch of next version is expected to be in mid 2010. Any feedback regarding this is highly appreciated.

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3 Answers

5

Although I cannot give you the desired answer, I hope I can give you a couple of good questions and ideas that maybe help you in the process:

City Coder: Flex 3 versus Silverlight 3 in Enterprise development

Microsoft Silverlight vs. Adobe AIR/Flex Debate

I personally think, that Adobe Flash is going to lose a noticeable user base in the near future duo to new features in the upcoming html 5.0 standard. Furthermore I prefer the tools (Visual Studio), addons and languages (C#) over the Adobe equivalents and I would consider these superior. However I have to emphasis that this is only from my perspective.. :)

answered 2009-06-14T08:50:53.593
0

If it is a stock trading product, does it stream the stock price in real-time? If it does, the cost of streaming the data will make some difference.

Both of them support some kind of data push (RTMP vs. Socket) and smart polling (RTMPT/RTMPS vs. HttpDuplexPollingChannel).

  • Infrastructural cost: Flex uses LCDS/BlazeDS while Silverlight uses IIS.
  • Development cost: RTMP/RTMPT/RTMPS is already defined (and cannot be changed) while you need to define your own protocol for socket (you need to handle security and compression yourself)

From programming perspective, Silverlight should be better since XAML is drawing the interface and C# updates the state of XAML components. There are plenty of C# developers and Expression Studio to create the XAML components.

MXML is relative simple and you need Flash to draw the fancy UI. You can wait for Flex 4 (in beta) with FXG support, however. Then, it might get better support for third-party components.

answered 2009-06-14T17:21:06.457
0

I don't think I could speculate on when or if Flex will have a similar number of 3rd party components. Many of the Silverlight components developed by companies like Telerik and DevExpress are ports or updates of existing .NET components. You might want to do a survey of companies that develop components for other Adobe products and ask on their forums if they plan to release a Flex product. Aside from that all I have to go on is what's available today and it sounds like you've already done the research on existing technologies. Good luck!

answered 2009-06-15T12:21:13.277

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