Crash Course in Next-Gen RIA: AIR, Silverlight, and JavaFX
Get a hands-on introduction to the newest RIA technologies from Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun by building demo applications using AIR (Flex), Silverlight (CLR), and JavaFX.
by Alexey Gavrilov
http://www.devx.com/RichInternetApps/Article/35208/
Posted by Randy Fong, Randall Fong Inc, randyfong@aol.com
-Special Thanks to Satori Canton, actionscript.com for the bulk of the notes you see here
-Thanks also to Marty Garrison, National Semiconductor for his notes
-Discussion on Flex and Java provided by Abdel Remani, Abdelmonaim.remani@gmail.com
Session Notes:
Q: What are the System Requirements for Flex and Silverlight?
A: Specific requirements would depend on the targeted platfrom capapbilites and the requirements of
the application.
Flex is displayed in the FlashPlayer 9 which has 90% penetration as of June 2007. It works across
web browsers and platforms.
Silverlight requires IE 6 or higher, FF 2.1 or higher, Safari on OSX 4.8 or above. Will run on
Windows and Macs. Linux support is expected in the future.
Q: How does Silverlight and Flex/Flash take advantage of hardware acceleration?
A: Silverlight doesn't use hardware acceleration.
Flash uses hardware acceleration on Video as of the latest point release of the player. It also
uses OpenGL on Macs.
Q: What tools do you use, and how much are they to create Silverlight or Flex/Flash applications?
A: Both Microsoft and Adobe offer packages of tools as well as individually priced products.
Pricing information can be found at their respective websites.
Silverlight is commonly created using Expression Blend and VisualStudio.
Flash/Flex applicatons are commonly created using the Flash IDE, FlexBuilder2 and also a free SDK
available from [http://labs.adobe.com] which can also be used with free open source tools, like the
.NET based "FlashDevelop" which is an open source alternative to FlexBuilder available from
[http://www.osflash.org].
Silverlight Development Tool Costs
Expression Suite = $599
Design = $199
Expression Blend = $199
Media Coder = $199
Visual Studio
Express Suite (free?) Go with that.
$299
MSDN subscription is good.
Adobe Flex Development Tool Costs
For Flash.
Adobe Flash CS3
Adobe Flex Builder 2 $499 + Charting tools $299.
Runs in Eclipse also.
Free Flex 2 SDK - comes with a compiler. but is difficult to use.
Adobe Fireworks CS $299 (web design tool)
Q: Discuss Flex, Silverlight and JavaFX and how they compare:
A:
Player: 99.3%
Runtime: 1.1MB
Language: MXML/AS 3.0
Player: -----
Runtime: 1.1 will be 4-6 MB
Language: XAML, .NET (C#, VB)
Player: 86.9% ??
Runtime: 4-6 MB
Language: JavaFX
Google Gears is a browser plug-in. Gives you local DB access in addition to the browser capability.
it does not provide any presentation foundation only backend replacement. GDD = Google Developer
Days
Q: Can you control client side windows from Silverlight or Flex?
A: No. In it's normal configuration, neither product is designed to reach outside of the browser
sandbox and control windows directly. However, it is possible to integrate Flash/Flex content in
AIR (formerly Apollo) and also in WPF instead of Silverlight to achieve this result from the
desktop.
Also, any two web enabled applications can always interconnect to each other through a server-side
workaround connecting the two, regardless of what they're written in.
Q: Can you do video capture in Silverlight or Flash/Flex?
A: Silverlight does not support this. And local storage wouldn't be available in either case
because of the security sandbox restrictions in the browser.
However, you could construct a video capture application in Flash or Flex that used a Flash Media
Server or Red5 to capture the stream to the server.
It's likely that Silverlight will have similar options.
Q: What framework do you use to create large scale applications in Silverlight and Flex?
A: In Silverlight, there is no currently accepted MVC framework for creating large scale
applications.
In Flex, most large scale applications use Cairngorm to abstract way the actual implementations of
the connection from the client to the server via services.
There is no de facto standard on for Silverlight at this time.
Q: What technology would work best and in what circumstances?
A: Depends on what the client is willing to pay for, performance and interoperability.
Q: What's the learning curve on both of these technologies like?
A: In both cases, it really depends on your background. Designers would likely find Flash and Blend
to be very familar. If you know one, it won't be hard to learn the other. Same with VisualStudio
vs. FlexBuilder. If you're a programmer, and if you know one of these tools, it's very easy to
learn the other.
Q: What are these technologies going to be like 2 years down the road?
A: In one year, Silverlight 1.1 sould be released. In two years, there should be richer controls
and assets produced by third party vendors.
Q: What third party software is there for these technologies?
A: Infragistics is already developing controls for Silverlight (as are many other companies)
In Flex, there are many commercial components (including a suite of charting components from Adobe)
as well as a very robust open source community developing tools, plugins and components for Flash
and Flex. See [http://www.osflash.org]
- For an application built in 3 FLEX/AIR, Silverlight, JavaFX go to:
http://devx.com/RichInternetApps/Article/35208.
- File size of Flex application shown http://sfLibraryMap.info was 275k, plus 164k for the Yahoo
Maps API.
- The Bay Area Application Developers Adobe User Group (BAADAUG) discusses Flex topics in San
Francisco.
http://baddaug.org/
- Silverlight 1.1 will ship within a year. It will include control components such buttons and text.
- Silverlight cannot make cross-domain service calls.
Back to SilverlightDevCampSFSessions
