Flex / Flash / Silverlight / Ajax or Something Else?
Your boss just handed you a design for an RIA (Rich Internet Application) and wants it delivered next month. You know there’ s Flex, Flash, Silverlight, Ajax, and even Java Applets to choose from. How do you pick the technology to use?
There are several considerations, but you need to begin with your requirements.
First, look at the user experience you need to deliver. Some things just scream “Flash”. For example: you want a spinning wheel or some other UI component that needs to be custom built.
Does the application look a lot like a windows application that lives in a browser? Do you also want to have a desktop version? Does it include charts? Flex is probably your choice.
Is the application basically an html page with dynamically updating controls and a perhaps a few animations? Ajax might work for you.
At this point in its development, I cannot really recommend Silverlight from Microsoft. I believe the product is too new, not well adopted, and the plug-in is hard for users to update. I won’t go off on an anti-Microsoft rant, but they’re not well known for cross-platform support. In fact at least one widely used web site that I’m aware of will not work on most Macs because of the way Silverlight was implemented.
I do a lot of Flex development and find Flex a compelling platform. Adobe is working hard to tame the performance issues, and there is no wa big user community developing components for Flex. Look for a product from Adobe (currently code named Thermo) for a way for designers and developers to work together to create visually stunning Flex applications.
Somewhere above 90% of a all computers currently on the net support the flash plug-in. Of course ~100% support javascript (and by extension Ajax). Just eb careful when selecting an Ajax toolkit, not all widgets perform well or work cross-browser.
