A lot of confusion has arose triggered by the recent announcements by Adobe… among one was that they would hand over Flex SDK to Spoon and leave updates and maintenance to the community, in this case including the way it has been done, imho. means the very rapid departure of Flex as a viable application platform.
Even in the upcoming 4.6 release, its far from feature complete to make it a viable mobile platform (Native Extensions is a half-baked poor solution to lack of resources to implement what should be part of the platform) and general performance remains ludicrous despite the effort put in to improve it in addition to the UI control which should be the force of Flex is far from complete.
Adobe Flex’s ultimate force was as an enterprise platform, however Adobe has in the past week announced that they are replacing Flex as the recommended enterprise application platform with HTML, please read Deepa’s blog post describing the change in focus of Adobe Flex…
http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html
The fact that the Flash Runtime is lost on mobile in general with the last weeks announcement to discontinue Flash for Mobile and the fact that it will not be running in Windows new Metro browser system makes it a no brainer that Flash Platform is going down as well, now its just a count down which we eventually dont know how long will take before Flash will disappear as a platform… the proposition that Flash Platform should survive as a casual gaming platform is difficult to have any sincere faith in, but perhaps time will show that there is a market to support it as a gaming platform, however as a RIA platform Flex and Flash Player Runtime is now officially not viable anymore anymore than ActiveX and Java Applets are…
Soon we will see Adobe taking all their hard earned knowledge and experience building Flex and putting into something equally useful, but based on the Web Standards stack and not a closed source proprietary platform such as Flash Player…
This is good news, it will make applications and experiences build using Adobe technologies generally better software system citizens by using the same technologies as the other members of arena, and now Adobe can focus on providing tooling and framework and not focus on maintaining a runtime as well…
We are already seeing some of the directions the tooling will take us, you only have to look at Adobe Edge, PhoneGap, jQuery Mobile possibly Adobe Muse (if you want to be aMused) to see that they are already way ahead on this and soon ready to release the first tools to facilitate making the initial experiences and small app’s using Web Standards Stack in replacement of Flex and Flash Player…
We are still far from having the strength of ActionScript and the Flex Framework, not to mention Flash Builder and the SDK itself, however it will come and we will be even better positioned for creating great experiences and apps for our markets than we were with Flex and the Flash Player runtime…
Following a comment to the post, I wanted to add this except from my response as its essential for the understanding of my point here (and to address the things I on purpose didn’t address in this post):
The current state of affairs is exactly that as described, Flex is no longer a recommended platform and there is no alternative available (yet) that can equalize it… thats it, in a nutshell.
However, making the decision to change focus and resources to be allocated on HTML instead of Flash and Flex is a good and sound decision, regardless how the decision may have been communicated and left us people working with Flex where the rubber meets the road hanging to dry.
The message itself and how you deliver the message is two separate things, the message is good and clear, the delivery was not exactly up to par which is causing the confusion now and the uproar in the community.
Therefore, my suggestion is that we discuss these two aspects separately from each other. In my post I was not trying to discuss the way this new change of focus and technical strategy was conveyed to the public and the community, but instead only focus on the decision itself and what it means in the long run for us working with Flex.
I agree, we are stuck right now with a very delicate situation because of this and because many people and even people close to Adobe were not made aware of this information until the public did… there are some pretty horrid stories going on backstage right about about how some people were left hanging to try on stage while presenting Flash Technologies, where people in the audience were following on Twitter how the storm hit following the Flash Mobile announcement, something the Adobe Rep on stage wasn’t informed about, and therefore were made to look like an ass on stage in front of 250+ people.
Lets keep pragmatic and keep emotions aside when discussing constructively what technological decisions have been made and what it means to us in the community, then we can always discuss the approach used afterwards when the dust has settled…
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