RIA Animation test.

Animation test (Silverlight (WPF/e) vs DHTML vs Flash vs WPF vs Apollo)

Alexey Gavrilov, Metalink

The goal of this test is to directly compare performance of different RIA frameworks / approaches in different browsers. The test, which implements simple animation demo was initially created in DHTML, then ported to Silverlight (WPF/e), Flex and WPF (XBAP). The code used in DHTML, Silverlight (WPF/e) and Flex is essentially the same while for XBAP demo it was ported to C#.

The applicability of results is limited of course to the performance of animation, however, this is correlated to many practical patterns of modern RIA applications such as drag-and-drop and layout transitions. Additionally it allows to quantatively compare performance of different versions of browsers / frameworks.

Test pages:

• DHTML
• Silverlight (WPF/e)
• Flash (Flex)
• Flash (Flex) with images cached as bitmaps -- much faster
• WPF (opens in new window and requires IE and .NET 3.0 to run)

If you are going to use it as the benchmark make sure that you have no other applications running at the moment. Some background browser window with flash may affect results dramatically.