Al Pascual

Limitations in Flex 3 and Silverlight 2

Lately I find myself playing with both technologies in the same day. Normally I have open by default Flex Builder 3 and Visual Studio 2008. Great if you thinking to slow down your computer.

Both technologies have become pretty popular to enriched the web applications to something more than HTML. I guess AJAX wasn’t the solution that web developers have been waiting for. I believe there is a raising concern to deliver rich user interfaces to the user without having to install a desktop application and being able to be cross platform. This is where Flex/Flash and Silverlight come into play.

Being a plug in for the browser, means will run the application downloaded from the server without having to install it. So it’s an application running on the browsers context and limited by the platform.

So those 2 technologies can run as a desktop application, however both Flex and Silverlight got limitation added by Adobe and Microsoft to resemble the browsers security. So let’s talk about the most important to me.

• Flex and Silverlight cannot have access to the users hard disk, they do have a isolated storage to save a few things. That storage is limited by the technologies. This is to avoid hackers using that technology to scan hard disks.
• Flex and Silverlight cannot make requests to domains besides their own without that domain allowing them to do so. This is the one I do not understand why Adobe and Microsoft implemented such a thing. Web developers now create proxies to bypass this problem and makes the request slower. I really hope one day, this limitation gets removed.

Even with that, makes a huge difference using these technologies to provide the user a rich environment.

I would like to mention this great post from Curtis Morley about Flex little things that you need to know about deploying Flex applications here. If you are using Flex, this is a must read.

Cheers

Al