Technical Comparison

From Vexi

This is the Vexi wiki so perhaps not completely impartial, but this article attempts to be as neutral as possible.

The common theme is that Vexi is uncompromisingly well engineered for its task - developing and deploying thin-client rich applications - but is a bit different and so has a learning curve (though it may prove to be an interesting one). For certain requirements, such as multimedia or embedding html, other technologies may be preferable.

Contents 1 Vexi vs. HTML / AJAX 2 Vexi vs. Applets 3 Vexi vs. Flash/Flex 4 Vexi vs. Silverlight

Vexi vs. HTML / AJAX

HTML was designed for writing hyper-linked documents and has since been extended to be an application platform. Originally web applications were very basic, with every update from the server requiring a fresh webpage to be loaded. Under the rubrik of AJAX they have evolved to become more dynamic. Pages can now be modified to reflect updates from the server.

As a technology it suffers from having a diverse set of poorly implemented standards, ad-hoc extensions and its document centric model. Its primary strength is its ubiquity, although this is undermined by historically low compatibility between different browsers, a problem intensified by Internet Explorer's oft-intentional poor adherence to standards.

Advantages of Vexi: Cleaner, more elegant Designed from the beginning to express applications Powerful abstractions and innovations More efficient execution More efficient development (lower cost) Only one unified platform to support (Not IE, Firefox, Opera, etc) Better layout

Disadvantages of Vexi: Lower Mindshare Platform less ubiquitous (Java vs. the Browser) Powerful abstractions Not embedded in a browser, so HTML or other plugins cannot be embedded

AJAX is clearly appropriate for very widely used but not overly complicated consumer and document based applications. GMail is a good example. Certainly the development costs of the interface are secondary to the convenience of the service. However developing non-trivial AJAX applications for small userbases is prohibitive as compatability and engineering issues accumulate.

Vexi vs. Applets

Applets are the original thin client solution.

Advantages of Vexi: Concise/higher level Declarative Powerful abstractions and innovations More efficient development (lower cost) Better layout Easier to learn (for non-Java developers)

Disadvantages of Vexi: Higher level Slower (in practise this may not be the case) Less suitable for multimedia, games Lower mindshare (although a decent Java engineer should not have any problems with learning Vexi)

Since both applets and Vexi require Java, anybody considering creating an application as an applet should seriously consider Vexi as an alternative.

Vexi vs. Flash/Flex

Similar to Html/AJAX. Flash/Flex has evolved from a technology for showing animations and multimedia to an application platform.

Vexi Advantages: Free Software vs proprietary (Flash) or commercial (Flex costs for the desktop components and some more for graphing support ~$800/developer) Fewer little gotchas that take time vs building apps (user reported experience) Vexi is a GUI framework, Flex uses a movie player to simulate/create user applications Could be made to run on anything Java runs on (vs Flash 8 and not Flash-lite right now)

Flex Advantages: Very pretty and graphs are built in (license required, see above) Drag and drop support with other applications using AIR Applications can be much more media rich (Movies, sound, anything you can code in Actionscript)

Despite the relatively high investment in Flash as a technology and Flex as a Flash application platform, Flex is still not fulfilling the claimed potential and there are relatively few good examples of well done Flash applications out there. The case can be made that if Vexi can be as good as it is, with relatively few resources at the project's disposal, it proves that a well engineered platform for applications is superior to an application platform engineered into an unsuitable environment.

Vexi vs. Silverlight

To be done