Well from my point of view it was the whole “write once run everywhere” thing.
I was totally annoyed of having to write UI things once and then patch and
bugfix things for all the other Browsers.
But in general I think you (Alex) and I have one great difference in our
assumption of who will probably be our generation 1 users.
You assume it’s mainly the people wanting to create new applications. That’s
why you see 1.0 the way you do it.
I, on the other side, think that our generation 1 users would probably be
people migrating legacy Flex applications to FlexJS.
The reason, why I think that way, is that no matter what bank or insurance
company I have worked for in the last 4 years. I always encounter Flashplayer
maintenance updates. I usually ask why Flash? And always get the answer: “We
still got some legacy applications that need that”. A little more investigation
usually shows that there are loads of applications still in production
internally which are built in Flex. There are plans to migrate to JavaScript,
but there just isn’t enough budget to simply rewrite something with the only
benefit in the end being no longer to require the Flashplayer. For me “Flex” is
stigmatized. Even if it’s not deserved, it’s still a reality. I doubt that
someone wanting to try out the latest cool stuff will tend to go directly
towards a stigmatized technology, not if there’s all the cool React, Angular2,
Typescript and similar stuff out there that does “the same we promise to
provide”.
If we get FlexJS to a point where it’s easy to migrate we sort of offer the
only option the people stuck in a dead-end with Flash have to migrate to
JavaScript at a fraction of the costs. That’s why I’m continuing to argue to
add the most essential Flex features to FlexJS. It doesn’t matter if AMF
support is slower than JSON or than AMF was on Flash. It just have to be there
to ease the migration path. Same with skinning. It’s been used quite a lot and
this I one concept where migrating isn’t just a matter of replacing some
classes. If there is no skinning support all the Components have to be
completely rewritten. Eventually we could do without modules, even if I think
they are essential, but for me it’s:
- AMF Support
- Skinning
- Modules
- ResourceBundles and I18N
Which we need in order to ease the migration path.
Chris
Am 13.01.17, 00:24 schrieb "Alex Harui" <aha...@adobe.com>:
On 1/12/17, 12:46 AM, "carlos.rov...@gmail.com on behalf of Carlos Rovira"
<carlos.rov...@gmail.com on behalf of carlos.rov...@codeoscopic.com> wrote:
>We need some strategy, and we must think about what others are giving in
>comparison with us.
>In LTE I think our solution win, but right now is complicate convince
>business to choose us over Angular/React, since is world trending.
>
>So I'm with Chris that we need to give things others doesn't have, for me
>maven is one of that things, but is something in the backstage.
>We need more things on that make us different. One of those things is AMF,
>and since many Flex apps out there have it is a key point to make them
>move
>to FlexJS.
I guess I'm wondering why folks chose Flex in the first place. Was it
some cool feature? If so, what was it? My assumption has been that the
real reason folks chose Flex (or maybe the reason they stayed) was about
Developer Productivity. A feature fight will be very difficult for us to
win without more contributors. Any feature we can produce as an advantage
would likely be short-lived: the other frameworks will simply produce the
same feature.
But we can win or at least compare more favorably on helping you get your
app into production faster and having fewer maintenance issues because we
are a single-source provider of both a declarative language and an
object-oriented language and have a tool chain in our workflow. And, I
still believe that having a SWF version of your app will be very valuable.
For those who are interested in modules, without the runtime verification
that Flash has, you will be at the mercy of any synchronization issues
between the code that loads the module and the code in the module. Flash
will tell you right when the module loads that it doesn't meet the
interface contract. When will you find out when running just in JS?
My 2 cents,
-Alex
