Can Flash or Silverlight be used for kiosk applications? How?

Question

My experience is only with Flash and I'm afraid I have not kept up to date. The last time I tried this I was vaguely remember having a problem with Flash where it would slowly eat memory until eventually the OS locked up. That was a couple of years ago and maybe it wasn't due to Flash.

Are there issues with using Flash or Silverlight for kiosk type applications?

How would they be set up? Would using FireFox in "kiosk" mode hosting the Flash/Silverlight app in a web page be good enough?

edit:

To answer a question about the type of application. This app would have limited interactivity. It would have a menu and users can click on the menu to view different content that consists of text, images and video. It would probably have transitional animation. I'm not sure yet if the kiosk is supposed to be a touch screen type of kiosk.

Answer 1

Both Flash and Silverlight would work.

Flash can be embedded into an executable or compiled as an exe. Both would work for the type of application you have mentioned. Silverlight 3 will enable out of the browser experience. If the kiosk will make use of the browser this really won't matter.

With Silverlight 3 (currently in beta) you can even have multi-touch support.

Answer 2

Well, I've never had to run a swf for 9 hours straight but I would say that flash has come a long way in the last few years (especially in performance and memory management). There are some great runtimes out now you can look at to see what options you have for RIA on the desktop:

Adobe AIR

Zinc

Titanium (my current favorite)

I couldn't comment too much more without knowing what kind of app you would be building. Same thing with the silverlight/Flash-Flex decision, depends on if you're building an app or some slick animated presentation...

Hope this helps, good luck!

Answer 3

Flash/Silverlight would seem like the perfect solution for a kiosk type application. Assumedly the kiosk machines are going to need have minimal maintenance done to them and the web deployment approach for apps is the best most mature one we've got.

The big advantage of using Silverlight is that if you have any business logic in .Net/Java type languages that needs to run client side it can usually be easily ported to compile against the Silverlight runtime (if .Net you may not even need to change a single line depending on which .Net framework libraries you use).

About the only thing that could limit the viability of using a browser based app in this situation is if you have some additional hardware access requirements such as a custom ticket printer, credit card reader etc. In those cases you'd be fighting the browser sandbox to get them to work.

Answer 4

you can look at Adobe AIR (similar to flex/flash) for running the application on a desktop/kiosk

Answer 5

Silverlight 3 and greater have a feature called Out of Browser which may suit your needs.