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Earlier this month Smashing Magazine posted a broad review of Flash and Silverlight. The review covers the way the two products handle things like animation, publishing to the desktop, scripting, small file sizes, socket connections, capturing web-cam content, etc.
While the article doesn't get into much depth about which is better or why, it presents the basics of how these things are implemented and lets you decide which fits your needs better. If you're a new RIA developer wondering which of these technologies to use on a client project, this article might be a good place to start.
While the article does a great job hitting a wide number of topics, I feel it lacks a little in depth on a few. The most notable of these is the comparison for accessibility - Smashing only covers the differences between which colors you're allowed to access. While color usage is an important part of accessibility, the far more daunting part of implementing a section 508 compliant application is integrating with screen reader technologies. As we've found on a few recent projects, implementing a screen reader in Flash or Flex is downright painful. Microsoft did a lot of work paving the way for web accessibility standards, and so Silverlight promises to integrate far more cleanly, though I haven't had the good fortune of building a 508 compliant application in Silverlight yet.
The biggest factor the article barely touches on is Silverlight's ability to tie in to other Microsoft products. With this like Azure and Live Mesh just peaking above the horizon, Microsoft is gearing up to provide a very seamless development experience from hosting to developing to deployment. These services do and will continue to support open APIs that Flash or AJAX developers can take advantage of, but expect some easier integration for Silverlight in Visual Studio. This is both the huge strength and huge weakness of everything Microsoft offers web-developers: seamless integration provided you use all and only Microsoft products. This is very compelling to traditionally Microsoft-friendly developers but total anathema to others. You can find any number of flame-wars raging on blogs across the net covering this topic, so I won't go into more depth on that here.
One interesting thing I learned from the article was how deep SEO support is in Silverlight. I didn't realize that since Silverlight files are stored as XAML and not a compiled format (like .SWF), textual content is freely searchable by all search engines. Currently only Google and Yahoo have the special technology Adobe provides to introspect and index a .SWF.
It was also interesting to note that while you can easily port a Silverlight application to WPF for the desktop, there's no way to directly publish one. Flash, on the other hand, provides the ability to produce a "projector" file, that publishes as a .exe or .app file and executes directly on the desktop.
The most important take away from this topic is the growing importance of Silverlight in the RIA market. Just last year the comparison between the two tools was pretty easy, and Flash was the clear winner, but with what's coming in Silverlight 3 it's time for RIA developers to take Silverlight a little more seriously.
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I personally found the article extremely lacking, with errors and out of date information.
Example, the animation comparison ignores the changes to the animation model made in Flash CS4. Or in socket programming, ignores binary sockets introduced in Flash Player 9, focusing on the older XMLSockets. Or failing to mention that Flash Player 10 renders OpenType fonts and handles text differently with the new text engine.
As for SEO, text that is actually embedded into SWF have been searchable for years (Flash 5? 6?) as Macromedia made available a search engine SDK. Previously the big limitation was dynamic text inside the Flash Player could not be picked up by search engines, until the recent "headless Flash Player". As far as I am aware, dynamic text in Silverlight is still not picked up by search engines. So Microsoft is still playing catching up as far as SEO is concerned.
I was also surprised at how much attention that article received, considering its content.
"One interesting thing I learned from the article was how deep SEO support is in Silverlight."
How deep is that? Too many SEO discussion focuses on theory, rather than asking which sites place highly with which terms.
"The most important take away from this topic is the growing importance of Silverlight in the RIA market."
And what importance is that? The article focused on features developers could code against, but only mentioned deployment concerns as an afterthought. What actual effect are these two technologies having in the world?
jd/adobe
As usual, this Flash vs. Silverlight article is laughable. Most of them seem to go out of their way to promote one over the other, I've seen it done both ways.
Animation: as Matthew stated, this comparison is outdated ignoring CS4. And the player won't maintain a frame rate unless you embed a blank audio track? What? That's a new one on me.
Video and Audio: it is mentioned that Flash supports multiple media formats but then we get a complaint about only one of them? As if the complaint over the one ruins the platform? Silverlight is better because you can get free tools from MS to encode to those formats? Aren't we ignoring the free tools to encode media to formats that Flash uses? Wait, someone points that out in the comments.
Accessibility: Silverlight is cool because it can use system colors for visibility reasons? Well, that is interesting. But on the other hand if I want high contrast color schemes in my Flash app I can just make them...
SEO: If your Flash content isn't being indexed it's because you aren't doing it right. And starting with Google with the new SEO tech is the right way to go because they have dominate market share. Once the system has had some time in that environment it makes it easier to move on to others.
Socket Programming: I don't normally do this with my projects but even I know this is outdated. And if this works just fine on both platforms then why does it matter?
Deployment: Again, if your Flash content is not being indexed you are not doing it right. Could someone explain to me how having Silverlight content spread around in folders (ok, I'm assuming the folders) lets them be indexed so easily? Because the XML files point to them? I'm guessing that's it. Anyway, doesn't having all these files spread around on the server increase our http requests which I thought a large number of IT people do not like?
Media Streaming: Really? Flash isn't good enough because there's no free service to handle the streaming for you? Really? Progressive download from your own server isn't good enough? Streaming from your own server isn't good enough? Red5 anyone? Cloud computing is nice and all but I don't think I would rely so much on a third-party solution for media hosting/streaming. And technically this is not a feature of Silverlight but a separate service that MS provides.
Then we get the better list at the bottom where Flash dominates and some of the choices for Silverlight are debatable. The scripting one shouldn't even be in there because that's not exactly easy one to determine. Actionscript over .Net (whichever language) is a personal choice and the learning curve is high for anyone starting from scratch.
As the comments pointed out, the article totally ignores deployment numbers of the plugins with the two platforms.
Even though I'm a Flash guy I like the idea of Silverlight. But I'm really getting annoyed by these constant comparisons that push an agenda of one over the other. Or try to anyway, intended or not. Personally I think this whole thing is starting to turn into Flash being a tool for one thing and Silverlight being a tool for another. Most of the people who seem to support Silverlight over Flash (even though most of the time they should be comparing it to Flex) do so on the development side because that's where they came from. "Silverlight is best for this RIA, it's best for this app, best for this development." That's fine, Silverlight seems to be shaping up to be a good RIA platform for those already knee deep in .Net, which is good. For those that are already into javascript development can slide into Flash quite easily since actionscript is almost the same thing. Everybody wins, so why all the bickering?
They are tools, no more. Flash has its uses just as Silverlight has its uses.
Glancing through the comments on the article suggests that some of the info on Silverlight itself is outdated or wrong. So whatever it is they were trying to do they failed horribly at it.
But it was nice to see some comments that were in line with my thoughts that bickering over Flash/Silverlight is useless, comparing Flash to Silver light is incorrect and should be Flex, that people who code .Net will of course love Silverlight (as they should) and that Silverlight has a long ways to go in supporting platforms that were not created by MS.
The comments were far more interesting than the article itself.
Quite interesting debate going on around the morgan stanley case where the microsoft silverlight prod manager is involved
http://www.devaldi.com/?p=47