SVG — Replacement for Flash application

Question

We are currently looking at developing flash based applications (using Flex) in a web application. We are now leaning towards to use SVG rapheljs for developing this components. The questions are:

1. Is still SVG platform is widely adopted by browsers (without any plug-ins) are at least down the line of 8-10 months, any adoption is expected by browsers? Cross-browser support is god for us.

2. Is SVG can replace for a small time animation based programming instead of Flash

Any comments will be greatly appreciated...

Answer 1

raphaeljs will give you amazingly good crossbrowser support. I tried nearly a year ago and almost all the demos worked flawlessly (although a little slow) in IE 6.

I would never count on native SVG support by IE. But raphael bridges this gap, so actually you are good to go.

However, you should consider that flash often provides lower size, better performance and absolutely identical experience accross browsers. On the other hand it performs quite poorly on both Mac and Linux (doesn't necessarily mean it performs worse than alternatives).

Also, flex is a full grown framework including databinding, remoting, a skinnable gui component set, accessibility and many many other things.

If you're going to choose JS+DOM+SVG/VML/canvas do yourself a favour not to reinvent the wheel, but use a proper framework instead, such as qooxdoo.