Microsoft Silverlight vs. Macromedia Flash – Battle of Titans
Choosing the correct structure for your web applications is the number one task you have to take care of when bringing a dynamical site online. There are two main competitors when it comes to this niche of web development. These are Silverlight from Microsoft and Flash from Macromedia. It is curious that with such a large company as Microsoft, Flash has become more famous than Silverlight. This is because Silverlight took a lot more time to impact the market than Flash. Let’s describe these two structures to have an amplified glimpse of its main advantages.
Both Silverlight and Flash are application structures that allow features like the reproduction of videos, vector graphics, animations and advanced interactivity. They are both very similar in the ways they manage to accomplish this. Other competitors of their kind are JavaFX, Open Laszlo and some components from AJAX. Silverlight’s first publicly-launched version was introduced in September, 2007. Today, the 5.0 version is distributed with no cost; the same as flash. So until now they are both very alike. Silverlight, differently from flash, launched an open code version called Moonlight. This version is mostly designed to work in operative systems based on UNIX.
Macromedia Flash, our second competitor, is one of Adobe’s most popular programs. It is an application that allows exactly the same as Microsoft Silverlight. The biggest advantage that is offered by flash is the following. A lot of the world’s most visited sites are actually designed over a Flash base (e.g. YouTube, Tweeter, etc). This makes Flash’s structure somehow more reliable and some designers feel safer when using Macromedia’s program; just because it is the most commonly used. Macromedia Flash uses a programming language called Action Script. This language is orientated to objects, and it allows the user to amplify all functionalities offered by flash on its design panels. With this language, users are actually able to even build their own interface very easily, even if it is complex. Action Script 3.0 is Flash’s language most famous version. It is said that this upgrade brought strong changes to Flash and its efficiency. There were several strong changes in the language for this 3.0 version; so much that even some syntax commands were changed.
These are both very good programs. However, most people tend to choose Macromedia’s famous, and always well seen, flash structure. There are a fair number of people that chooses Silverlight over Flash for their own convenience reasons. This is why it is important to have a strong vision of what is needed, in order to choose the best program for the specific cause.
