Wednesday, July 2, 2008

flex / silverlight comparison

I've just attended a presentation comparing flex and silverlight. In short, both languages are equivalent in terms of functionalities and libraries, which is not really a surprise... However, the noticeable differences are:

- IDE: Flex builder exploits 10% of eclipse capabilities and is far behind visual studio (but is far less expensive). There is not even automatic indentation!
- performance: current silverlight version (2 beta) is 3 times slower than flex 3! Remember flex is itself 3 times slower than Java.
- deployment: flex plugin is deployed at 97%, silverlight is probably closer to 3%.

Of course these differences holds at this very time. Both platforms try to catch up with the other to become the leader, but no doubt flex is ahead for the moment.