Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight are not Same

I find a lot of comparisons regarding the Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR. are they same or there is some else in both of these rich Internet application creation tools or framework. I researched over the Internet trying to find out weather both of these platforms are same or they are different and I find out that these two platforms have some similarities but they are totally different. Lets see what all these Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR.

Can be Defined as

Adobe air is cross platform cross operating system environment for for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and AJAX. Adobe AIR application also be deployed on the desktop also.

Microsoft Silverlight is a web browser plugin that provides support for rich Internet applications such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback. Microsoft Silverlight supports .Net framework and Visual Studio tools for developing rich Internet applications.

Advantages

Adobe AIR is more tend to reusability of Adobe Flash, HTML and JavaScript code. Adobe AIR applications can also be deployed on desktop computers as well as a browser plugin. Adobe AIR applications that run on browser does not require any installation but they have limited access to computer resources. While the desktop deployment has the unlimited access to local files system as well as the processing power of local computer.

Microsoft Silverlight provides a rich graphics application framework for developing application like multimedia, graphics, animations and interactivity into a single runtime. Textual content created with Microsoft Silverlight is more searchable and indexable as compare to Adobe Flash, because Microsoft Silverlight content is not compiled. Silverlight can also be used to create Windows Sidebar gadgets for Windows Vista.

Limitations

The AIR runtime exposes native system functionality to JavaScript through a simple and relatively intuitive API. This includes support for basic window management, creating native menus, configurable Taskbar and tray icons, local file system access, clipboard support, robust drag-and-drop capabilities, and basic networking support. The AIR runtime also includes integrated support for SQLite and a decent JavaScript API for persistent storage.

Developers are limited to the native system functionality supplied by the runtime, because there is no way to expose additional native libraries or extend the runtime itself. This creates a very low ceiling for scalability and indicates that AIR isn’t currently intended for either computationally intensive or large-scale application development. Lack of support for existing native code libraries is a weakness that Adobe hopes to remedy in the future. The ability to use CSS in Adobe AIR still has some limitations.

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 and 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 Rich set of development languages are available for Silverlight. Developer can use JavaScript as well as managed code VB.Net, C# for Silverlight development.

Silverlight doesn’t even have support for things that should be considered a stock part of any library such as buttons, checkboxes, list boxes, list views, grids, etc. Probably in future release may Microsoft support it. Per pixel bitmap editing, bitmap filters (convolution, color matrix, etc), bitmap effects (drop shadow, blur, glow) cannot be done.

Source : arstechnica, Microsoft Silverlight website, Adobe AIR, Wikipedia, Silverlight.net forum

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