I’m interested in opinions on both RIA platforms. What do you think about each in terms of the current status and possible futures. And what is your background - are you dev for either/both platforms, if not where do you find yourself encountering flash and silverlight? Do you prefer one over the other?
My main consideration is multi-platform support.
I’m a linux user, along with windows. Flash support is provided officially by adobe, and as such, much of the web is available to me.
Silverlight, however, is a microsoft product. As such, I find no official support other than on newer windows operating systems ( I don’t know if silverlight is even supported in Windows Pre-XP).
I’m sure you’re aware of all the newer devices coming on the market: smart phones, set top boxes, etc… Flash is already supported on many of those devices, and currently flash is nearly ubiquitous. Chosing a [currently] niche product will severly limit your adoption. (I’m using linux, and I’m aware of how hard it is to do some of the things that windows/mac users get)
That said, there is unofficial support for both flash and silverlight through some community driven applications, and I’m going to try out moonlight (silverlights opensource implementation of silverlight)
I’ve heard good and bad things about both from the development side.
My company switched from developing pure javascript to silverlight recently. Apparently it is easier to develop simple apps in silverlight and you can tap an existing C# development pool. Reports that I am hearing from that side of the shop is that silverlight has the common problem that the rest of .NET has: It’s easy, quick and profitable to develop applications that stay on the beaten path, but it lacks the maturity and forethought that went into other more publicly designed frameworks. But those developers who are using silverlight now say it beats the pants off dealing with all the browser compatibility headaches of javascript.