Continuing with my blog series of comparing the technologies for developing rich internet applications (RIAs), today is the day for Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Again, both of these are commonly preferred client-side web development techniques that developers are nowadays using to create interactive web applications.

Microsoft Silverlight has recently entered the RIA world. On the other hand, Adobe has been in the RIA market for quite longer. Let’s quickly get started with the tug of war results:

Adobe Flex wins….

From the functionality point of view, Flex is a clear winner supporting Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems with Silverlight not supporting Linux on any browser. Audio and video features are again richer for Adobe technologies. Flex development with its enhanced multimedia capability can provide greater user experience. Though, the latest Silverlight has added multimedia support and has some enhanced animation effects. Adobe is quite ahead in out-of-browser capabilities as it has several nice built-in advanced features like integrated browser and support for local SQLLite database with automated client/server data synchronization. Again, Silverlight has moved in this direction too with Silverlight 4 offering much tighter integration with HTML and advanced support for trusted applications.

Silverlight wins….

Silverlight wins in templating and styling. Flex styling is based on inheritance and quite commonly regarded as inflexible. Silverlight development has an ability of overriding existing template completely, which is a much powerful concept, but the price is excessive information in your XAML, not easily readable. If we consider pure computational performance, Silverlight is a clear winner. Flex does not have any built-in support for multithreading, which complicates the situation further.

Conclusion

As of now, if needing rich out-of-browser functionality or a program to be run on Linux, go for Adobe Flex. Silverlight, too, is progressing very fast and promises better integration with other Microsoft technologies. Overall, the future is bright indeed for Silverlight and Flex both as both have much ground to conquer in the continent of next generation applications.