Road To Silverlight - Part 1

Its quite obvious now that the war for the platform on which Rich Internet Applications would be developed is between two main competitors i.e Microsoft and Adobe. Although there are some other options like OpenLaszlo and JavaFX, but surely both Microsoft and Adobe have a major share in the market as far as the RIA is concerned.

Adobe has already released Flex Builder and Flex SDK enabling the developers to create rich user interfaces with ease. Flex 3 is officially available and you can download a copy of the software and a free sdk from here. At the time of this post, Adobe is currently working on Flex 4.

I have been working on Flex for quite some time now. Using Flex for development has its own pros and cons. The first problem is the absence of an architectural framework. Probably i should had said...presence of too many frameworks. Having a background in PHP development, i know it can be a nightmare for a newbie when it comes to choosing a right framework. You can probably ask some geeks around, most of them would recommend you to use some framework...say CakePHP for example, but once you start using that framework, you may end up concluding that the learning curve is too much or may be its insufficient for your requirements.

Probably best two frameworks to use with Flex are Cairngorm and PureMVC. Cairngorm is the first choice as far as the popularity is concerned, PureMVC though claims to have a better architecture. I had some problems using sequence commands and binding in Cairngrom but i think View and Model separation has been achieved in cairngorm.

Secondly, I hate AS3 or actionscript 3. Actionscript which is based on ECMAScript not only has strange sort of syntax as compared to C++, java or C# but also many features that you would expect a language to have are also missing. Private Constructors, Method Overloading, Enums, Generics, Data Structures and constants inside interfaces are few examples. Though actionscript does support functional programming and this is probably the only feature that i liked in AS3.

Next the IDE that comes with flex is Flex Builder. Flex Builder is built on eclipse but lacks many features that eclipse IDE has. Refactoring is cumbersome, it eats up the memory and becomes a headache as the project grows.

Ok, lets talk about something positive now. Documentation of Flex 3 has been improved significantly since version 2.0.

Flex has ability to transfer data using AMF (Action Message Format) loosely based upon SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol) . So flex can exchange data using RPC. Moreover, third party tools like weborb enables us to develop server side virtually in any language and then communicate through AMF or HTTP to exchange data.

The another positive side of flex is that it is not dependent on javascript as much as silverlight 1.0 was. Flex though can communicate with javascript to use features like history management and ajax. Not only Flex SDK is now opensource but also Adobe has released a version of Flex Builder for linux too.

With over 98% of users having flash player installed and flash plugin freely available across different platforms, it can definitely be the first choice of any developer.

Silverlight 2.0 which is in beta looks very promising though...If the statistics claiming that more than 90% people are using windows are true, then Microsoft probably has a very good oppurtunity to capture the market if they include silverlight with the next version of Windows.

Thats it for today... i ll continue talking about silverlight in the next part.

Cheers