Silverlight - Flash Killer or a Flash in the Pan? (Part 1)

Posted by Phil Martin

Anyone who has visited a website knows what Flash is. Sure, you may not know the name, or what it means - but you know how cool it looks when things fade in, slide across the screen, and then magically fade out. More likely than not, that's Adobe Flash doing the work.

Flash is an optional browser component that allows web sites to create a very rich experience, Unlike the usual static web pages that are - well, let's face it - if it ain't got Flash, it's boring. In geek-speak, Flash is a downloadable ActiveX control running in the browser sandbox that creates dynamic content using interpreted script. Which is a fancy way of saying it looks really, really cool. And Flash has been (until recently) the only way to look really, really cool.

A little history: Flash was originally developed for designers, and as such the development experience has been focused on keeping designers happy. So hard-core developers such as me have a love/hate relationship with Flash. We love the way it makes a web page look, but equate working with Flash with a root canal - it's something you have to endure in order to look good (unless you think rotting teeth are sexy). To say that I abhor working in Flash is an understatement. Any sane 'real' developer agrees with me. And by 'real' I mean anyone who has coded at length in a true object-oriented language such as C++, C#, Java, Delphi, etc. I'm sure that now I'm going to get hate-mail from all of you Flash developers out there. But there is no way you guys can appreciate how hard it is for people like me to wrap our minds around that timeline thing. I had a tough enough time figuring out Photoshop! Coding in 3-dimensions is just bizarre.

But everything changed around May of 2007. That's when Microsoft released their 'Flash killer' called Silverlight. Every time I hear that name I get flash-backs of Silverfish, those nasty mini-roach creatures that scurry around in the dark eating the Fruit Loops you dropped the morning before. But I digress.

So enter Silverlight 1.0. It only supported JavaScript, which is no better than the ActionScript that Flash uses. No point awarded. It didn't support access to local hardware (such as webcams) like Flash does, so 1 point for Flash. It looked really, really cool, though - just like Flash. No point awarded.

One awesome thing about Silverlight, though - instead of requiring a pre-compiled move as Flash does (think .swf) Silverlight can run off of XML that is interpreted at run-time. That means that you can create an entire movie programatically on-the-fly in ASP, ASP.net, PHP, etc - any platform that supports scripting of some kind. It also means that Silverlight application content is visible to search engines, whereas everything within a Flash movie is hidden. 1 point to Silverlight.

And, of course - Flash has an embedded base (already installed) of over 99%. SIlverlight is the newbie and requires a new download. 1 point to Flash.

Flash 2, Silverlight 1. Not too promising. But a little over a year later, something changed all of that. We'll talk about it in my next blog post.

Posted August 22, 2008 2:35 PM