Xtremax - Web Design

Microsoft has launched Silverlight and as any other product it is gaining fame for itself. So, let’s review if it really has something new and advance to offer other than the old and most used flash. I have taken a course to compare both silverlight and flash side by side for each feature and functionality. I have tried to cover couple of features, if left any please feel free to point it out.

• Silver light doesn’t support Linux, so can’t be use on other OS other than Windows and Mac. On the other hand flash had no such limitations

• Silverlight usually run with file format WMV which makes it no good with vast majority of video streaming webs, like you tube itself. Flash facilitates more formats than WMV but to run these formats flash codex must be installed on the client machine.

• Silverlight has no data binding mechanism, though flash can also not do it and only read from XML or URL, this is same thing silverlight is also able to do.

• Silverlight has no support for things that are called as content library, like buttons, list boxes and stuff. Flash has a rich content library

• Silverlight 1.0 doesn’t support Image formats, like GIF, BMP. Only JPG and PNG file formats are supported. On the other hand flash supports all the formats for Images.

• Using silverlight it is found that at some extent while implementing on the page there is some sort of flickering on the image. However this is not the case in flash, it uses a refresh layout or cache bitmap functionalities are available.

• In beta release some bugs are found like, audio plays before starting the video and sometimes video continues to play even after redirection of the page. Flash is free from these kind of issues reason could be the long time for which it had been a development tool.

• At the moment there is no support for silver light object to be played as windows application, where as flash can be played as windows application after downloading its player, and also can be packed within an .exe for deployment in standalone form

• Silverlight supports the WPF animation model, which is not only time based instead of frame based, but lets you define the start and end conditions and it will figure out how to get there for you. No need to deal with matrixes like in flash. Also there is no need to calculate positions on various frames. It just works. Animation model in flash is frame based

• Silverlight uses XAML. XAML is text based and can be output using a simple XML object and flash stores its shapes using binary shape records. In order to write shape definitions, you will need to either license a 3rd party Flash file format SDK, or build your own. It isn’t too difficult, but it does require a bit of a learning curve.

• The debugging with Silverlight is simpler than with flash. The debugging with flash is harder than Silverlight

• Silverlight does not require video codex to run industry standard videos like .WMV where as Flash requires video codex to run .WMV videos.

• Silverlight supports scalable video formats from HD to mobile and Flash does not support scalable video formats from HD to mobile.

• Silverlight has XAML based presentation layer for SEO where as flash does not have XAML based presentation layer for SEO.

• Silverlight provides End-to-end server and application platform and flash does not provide End-to-end server and application platform.

• Silverlight supports Scalable full screen video and flash does not support Scalable full screen video.