Adobe Flash vs. Silverlight 3

Till now ‘Adobe Flash’ has been the de-facto standard for most streaming activity be it CNET, You Tube or BBC. We find that most of the times Adobe Flash player fails to deliver speed, audio capability, and video consistency. Microsoft promises to break these shackles by introduction of Microsoft Silverlight 3.0. Some advantages of Silverlight 3.0 over Adobe Flash

· Silverlight supports the WPF animation model, which is not only time based instead of frame based, but lets you define the start and end conditions , it will figure out how to get there for you. No need to deal with matrixes like in flash. Also no need to calculate positions on various frames. It just works.

· Silverlight lets you embed true type font information directly into your projects, and download that information with the downloader object.

· In addition to supporting a rich set of development languages (VB.Net, C#), debugging too has become relatively simpler.

· XAML is declarative while ActionScript is imperative. Using imperative languages to build UIs goes back to the early days of DOS and Windows, when developers had to manage all of the API nuances when interacting with graphical panes.

· Silverlight does not require video codec to run industry standard videos like .WMV

· Silverlight supports scalable video formats from HD to mobile and Hardware-assisted editing and encoding solutions. It also supports Scalable full screen video.

· Silverlight provides End-to-end server and application platform.

Moonlight = Open Source Silverlight 3

After coming to spotlight recently for donating around 20,000 lines of code to open source community, Microsoft has started with the open source foundation called ‘CodePlex’ (not to confuse this to their open source code sharing website of the same name).

This being the driving force behind an open source implementation of the Silverlight browser plug-in called Moonlight. Moonlight which is based on Mono (an open source implementation of .Net) is being jointly developed by Microsoft and Novell to:

• Allow Silverlight applications to run on Linux
• Offer a Linux SDK(software development kit) for Silverlight applications
• Use the existing Silverlight engine to develop desktop applications.

Like Silverlight, Moonlight manifests as a runtime environment for browser-based rich Internet applications (RIAs) and, similarly, adds to animation, video playback and Vector Graphics capabilities. Developers are also creating desktop Widgets called “dekslets” to extend Moonlight applications beyond the browser.

Silverlight is not only emerging as competition to Flash, but is also revolutionizing browser plug ins with continual changes. 

Watch this space for more ……..

— Pranav Deo