Comments on: Apollo, Flash, WPF/E, WPF and Firefox Speed Tests

By: jackdavid

jackdavid — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 12:14:02 +0000

i also think like that what ever you are thinking, what a considence, and i think it will be very helpfull for us and also that is a good platform for us to discuss.

By: Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 07:36:05 +0000

Don, how useful are things like this? Maybe not that useful from a technical perspective, but they’re interesting, and it does generate a bit of conversation. I think you bring up a good point about having a discussion of in-browser vs. out-of-browser. Maybe I can put my thoughts into a ZDNet post.

By: Don Burnett

Don Burnett — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:40:44 +0000

I have a couple of questions about why we would even be benchmarking these things beyond asking the question are these platforms sufficiently capable for applications and deployment? It’s obvious that both of these platforms are going to have areas of advantage and disadvantages. A few FPS one way are another aren’t gonna tell the story of whether wpf (and wpfe) succeeds where flash/flex/apollo does or doesn’t.

Together these both represent significant movement forward for everyone. I’d love to see more people thinking about how we can use them together in our own mashups. I really feel they are quite different enough they won’t really eat into the other’s space, as they are different enough that they will find different purposes..

I am really not sure the benchmarking thing is very useful, as I wouldn’t use it as a business reason for recommending or not recommending an application be developed on the platform. I would really love to see more discussion about the business reasons for using this and when to make an app that works in the browser versus making it a desktop app..

Now if we were talking about hardware accelerated 3D in WPF versus something like PaperVision 3d maybe there would be more that would come to mind to discuss..

I guess I am hoping this spurs more discussion about issues like:

If I am making an internet app when should it just run in the browser, when should we use ajax/spry, when would an app be more appropriate outside the browser, and how to make the business case for each of these scenarios and why..

Anyway that’s just my thoughts. Thanks for hopefully starting off this dialog anyway.. Benchmarks are fun just the same, what’s that old saying “there are benchmarkes, lies, and damn benchmarks” can’t quite remember that quote..

By: Felipe Ferreira

Felipe Ferreira — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 01:34:18 +0000

hmm…really interesting this comparison. but it’s good to remember that wpf/e it’s on his ctp version, and performance improvements will be made before the final product is arrived

By: Ryan Stewart

Ryan Stewart — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:44:14 +0000

Cool, thanks Alexey. I was kind of confused about that because I didn’t think the local cache of the SWF would make any difference. I’ll fix the post!

By: Alexey Gavrilov

Alexey Gavrilov — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 22:24:45 +0000

Hey Ryan, thanks for posting this. Just a little clarification on what actually “Flex / cached” version was. It’s the version of the test, where cacheAsBitmap option is set for objects being animated (ie balls) unlike original version, where it all rendered in vectors. The reader pointed out in comments that turning this on can boost the performance of a Flex version (and it did for certain platforms) so I added it to the comparison.

By: John Dowdell

John Dowdell — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:35:54 +0000

I haven’t evaluated the tests, and so can’t describe what they actually measure… sounds like just simple screen-drawing.

Browsers definitely do vary in how frequently they grant plugins access to the processor. I’m not surprised that even an alpha release of the Apollo runtime would offer 50-250% performance boosts… Apollo is actually a desktop application, not a document browser. (If he’s saying that Apollo alpha outperforms shipping Vista WPF, then that would shock me.)

The observation that Microsoft traffic into his first test was forty times as large as that from Adobe domains was interesting, because their staff is only about a dozen times as large as Adobe’s staff — higher per-capita rate. Their blog aggregator is also staff-only, so maybe they went to something like MXNA to see what customers were saying.

jd/adobe

By: SÃ¶nke Rohde » RIA Benchmark

SÃ¶nke Rohde » RIA Benchmark — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 15:48:07 +0000

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