flex vs silverlight - arcgis server 9.3
I think for me ... after working with ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server and other Web GIS products ... my bias is always based on speed, interaction, appeal, informative and well animated web GIS applications. All these years we had Coldfusion, JSP, ASP, JavaScript, Java Applets, AJAX and others ... trying hard to make this 'rich experience' happen. Silverlight API for ArcGIS Server came into play only recently and we can blame ESRI for not releasing both APIs same time. I believe ESRI created unnecessary anxiety (sorry guys, its true ...) in the web GIS community.
Most Web GIS developers in this region (Asia) are moving in the Flex dev direction. Some of the ESRI developer offices (i.e. ESRI Australia) focus a lot on Flex. From a design, animation and UI standpoint ... Microsoft doesn't have good tools (unlike Adobe) to design skins, animation, buttons, frames, layouts and charting. Silverlight's biggest drawback is web visual design tools, CSS support and IDE for these. I've been prototyping small apps in Flex and find its handling of events, listeners, navigation and states very innovative ... I dare any developer not to find this cool.
If we are looking from enterprise coding standpoint, Silverlight wins... no doubt. The power of Silverlight is the .NET framework. Coding C# or VB.NET is so much better and efficient with the .NET Framework. Adobe will never have the power of programming like .NET. I suppose familiarity with Visual Studio and .NET style of coding makes us lean towards Silverlight more. ActionScript is a steep learning curve for any developer.
Tough choice ... esp for GIS developers ... we are not really mainstream web developers to decide on which platform..
posted by geotone @ 4/23/2009
3 Comments
3 Comments:
mmmmhh.... interesting thoughts. I am currently at a "fork in the road" as we want to go from our basic AJAX .Net ArcGIS web mapping application to a RIA using either Flex or Silverlight. I have been comparing the two to make a selection, but it has been difficult to choose. Here are some of the points I have found:
Both use REST endpoints to access map servicesBoth offer mapping, graphics, querying, find attributes, identify features, geoprocessing, geometric opsBrowsers for Flex requires Flash viewer, over 80% of browswers already have itBrowsers for Silverlight requires SL plugin, easy installTo develope Flex requires Flex Builder ($245) or Flex SDK (free)Silverlight development requires MS Visual Studio ($800) or MS Visual Web Developer (free)Code is MXML and ActionScript for FlexCode is XAML and C# or VB.Net for FlexResponsiveness is about the same for bothWhile testing RIA apps, I had both Flex and Silverlight websites crash at least onceESRI has a good start on Flex with a downloadable Flex ViewerArcGIS Flex SDK version 1.1...Silverlight ArcGIS SDK is still in BetaLearning curb...already familiar with .Net so I just need to learn XAML for Silverlight but for Flex I have to learn MXML and ActionscriptOverall, they both are extremely similiar. I think I am leaning towards Flex just because it seems easier to implment and ESRI has provided a good starting point the the Flex viewer, however, Silverlight also seems very appealing so I might end up doing both!
"Actionscript is a steep learning curve for any developer."
Really? Actionscript 3? It's ECMA script after all. Essentially just strongly-typed Javascript, and honestly not that far off C# syntactically.
I would think that most web developers could transition to the MXML/AS3 model pretty easily.
I was asking me the same questions, and comparing the features on both options.
Im a .Net developer myself so using c# would be a great plus to weight my decision..
However, the deal-breaker was printing. Silverlight does NOT support printing at this moment (unbelievable).
How can a Mapping Application (of any sort) not be printable?
Believe it or not 80% of we GIS users need to print a map (or report) at some point.
I think going Flex its a no-brainer.
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