This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex … !
This week at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC), there have been two big news stories. The first is the give-away of a free tablet PC to all attendees, and the second is the release of Silverlight 4 beta. Whilst the first story is sure to grab the headlines, the second is far more significant, with official launch of Silverlight 3 having passed just 4 months ago.
There are many new features in Silverlight 4 including, printing support, improved databinding, new controls, improved mouse support, clipboard, drag’n'drop, and much much more. You can be sure that Silverlight 4 will receive a lot of blog coverage over the next few months, it is worth subscribing to Silverlight Cream to get a good overview of all blogging activity. (It looks like Shawn Wildermuth is not sleeping and has blogged about the improved SL4 databinding support already!)
While the new features are very exciting, what interests me more is just how fast Silverlight is developing. Time for a bit of analysis …
Four months ago I took a detailed look at Silverlight adoptions figures, which I don’t expect to have changed much since then. This time I want to look at the rate of development of the framework itself. The following chart plots the date at which major releases of some key RIA technologies were released (plus predicted release dates for SL4 and Flex4):
(Data collected from Wikipedia pages on Flash, Flex, JavaFX and Silverlight).
As you can see from the above chart Silverlight is being developed very aggressively with major versions being released with less than a year between them. Interestingly the above chart shows an almost constant development velocity for each RIA technology. Which leads me to the next chart …
Here we can see that Silverlight development is occurring at a rate of 1.5 version increments per annum (VIPA [1]) , whilst Flex is lagging behind at 0.7 VIPAs … and JavaFX just 0.3 VIPAs!
There you have it. Unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex.
Regards, Colin E.
[1] Hey look … I’ve developed a new unit here. Do you think in years to come they might come to be known as Colins? Eberhardts?
Tags: flex, News, silverlight
[...] Related article: Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind [...]
The best case for Flex, say 3 – 5 years from now, is to be able to retain or stay as relevant as that of Java to .NET. The dev environment for Silverlight is just too scary. With VS, .NET framework, and the integration between them all will smoke Flex.
Silverlight is built with a single purpose: to be the best in RIA. Is it going to own that space? I think so.
Flex supports right to left languages but SL does not …
Hi Anon,
RTL is supported in SL4:
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/11/18/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-complete-guide-new-features.aspx#bidi-rtl
Regards, Colin E.
I think Microsoft is still doing it the bad way. The main concept is : Add more features than any other of your competitors and than you will have the best product… But this I found bad.
Just like my windows mobile. Has TONS of features compared to the iPhone. Still it is not good. It is slow, hard to use, incosistent, sometimes freezes and so on. Compared to it the iPhone “just works”. Sure I can’t have an mms with it but what works works.
Its a quite a bit same with the Flash. Flash is stable. I mean super-stable (by the developers view of point). Flash has a large developer community sending Adobe feedback for more than 10 years now. And they are developing the player SLOWLY. Listening to the developers what features they want, making it faster and so on..
Microsoft doesn’t has this. Very few people are developing in silverlight (compared to Flash). The fact is that very few people USE silverlight (View silverlight content). I see a silverlight app one time every 2 weeks.
So Silverlight is definetly cool for Microsoft-only firms. But it has a long way to go until it is a worthy match for the Flash platform. At this speed I think it will be at approx. version 25
Hi Balint,
Thanks for the feedback. Personally I think Silverlight is aimed at a different market to Flash, hence I tend to compare it more to Flex. Silverlight has a powerful framework born out of WPF which is great for building applications. If you want to just add some interactivity to a web page, I would recommend Flash everytime, but for Rich Internet Application development, my money is on Silverlight.
Developed at a rate of 1.5 VIPAs Silvelight will reach v.25 by 2023, whilst Flash (at 0.9 VIPAs) will be just behind at version 22.6
Regards, Colin E.
Silverlight is making rapid progress, but you are not measuring anything meaningful at all by counting major version numbers. There is no standard for how many function points make a version increment, either between products or within them. Your graphs are gibberish.
Thanks Homer, but graphs never lie!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-in-cheek
Regards, Colin E.
Hi David,
I get your point. However, bug fixes just don’t look so good in press releases!
Regards, Colin E.
I’m alright with new versions as long as they fix the mundane/boring but necessary things like, oh, I don’t know, scrolling with the DataGrid.
It’s always an interesting question when to raise versions… the SL guys are indeed making big progress but I feel they’re pushing the version numbers quite fast as well. It’s worth noting that Silverlight 2 was referred to as SL 1.1 for a long time until it got released.
Also note how Java evolved from version 1.0 in 1996 to the current 1.6 in 2009 (13 years!). I would prefer the naming as Sun did it (since it really did not make breaking changes mostly, only added new and new features) but after 1.5 even they realized that it wasn’t so cool and started naming it v5 and v6.
So I guess the versioning just indicates that Microsoft is being the cool kid. And if you ask me, that’s fine, Silverlight is starting to get as cool as Flash (though probably some versions to go until we’re there!)
So Java is progressing at just 0.04 VIPAs, whilst C# is storming along at 0.5 VIPAs?
Regards, Colin E.