Apologies in advance if this ruffles some feathers... As a Flex developer and, of late, professional Adobe apologist the past few months have been challenging. More recently, it seems that frustration has reached the point of rolling boil.
Let me first state unequivocally that I still believe Flex is the best RIA solution available today for a wide swath of applications and the current ecosystem will live on for many years to come in some capacity. What remains to be seen is what that capacity is and if the ecosystem grows, shrinks or stays relatively the same. To be honest, given the current state of affairs, I don't feel very optimistic about the trajectory of things. I don't think Flex is going to go away any time soon, but I (personally and selfishly) don't want to be the guy locked in some broom closet maintaining some second-class citizen, line of business Flex application(s) because noone understands them enough to rewrite them in HTML/JS/CSS and noone has the appetite for greenlighting any new projects based on Flex. If I wanted that, I'd learn Fortran. Here is what I "know" today. First, the people making technology decisions (the suits) have read just enough to "know" that Flex is Flash and Flash is a bloated and insecure technology, doesn't work on their iPad or iPhone and HTML5 is the way forward. Adobe has "abandoned" it and has explicitly stated that HTML5 is the best option for RIAs in the future. So, unless you're doing video or gaming - nothing to see here, move along. They "know" all of this for some very basic reasons. (1) There is a very large ecosystem around JS/HTML5 and a lot of buzz. (2) That ecosystem is just as interested in money as anyone else and are selectively pulling information to suit their agendas. (3) Apple doesn't support Flash! Adobe abandons Flash mobile! These are the sensational headlines of the stories that are in the rags. (4) Adobe fumbled some messaging along the way. (5) Most importantly, nodbody is changing the narrative. So every day I come to the mailing list for a ray of hope. Looking for some glimpse in to how we as a community are going to respond. How we as a community are going to change the narrative. How, with still (arguably) the best RIA technology available today we're going to start acting like it as a collective. We discuss cross-compilation to JS, compilers, build environments, component proposals, coding standards, infrastructure (jira, test frameworks, etc.). And, frankly, it makes me want to scream. Decisions are being made TODAY on what technology to use for upcoming projects. Decisions are being made TODAY regarding whether to continue to grow Flex projects or cut losses and begin migrating them to HTML5. We have a stable, extensible and proven solution for providing cross-platform (including mobile - even Apple!), rich, immersive and visually appealing software TODAY. We have professional tools TODAY. We have a solid set of components out of the box TODAY. Why does it feel like we're playing catch up or having to sing for our supper? The decisions being made today are being made by people who don't care one bit what build technology the Flex SDK uses. They don't care if the SDK compiler is efficient and quick. They don't care how its tested or even if its tested - they care that it works. They want to know that given a set of problems it offers a set of solutions and building blocks. They want a rich component set and something that works on the desktop, tablet and phone without having to build 4 or more different applications. They want to see that the framework is improving, growing and is supported by someone or something. Considering all of that, the only thing I don't see happening is the growing/improving and I'm beginning to get a little nervous (with a side of impatient). I don't need anything from the framework, but I do need Flex to be viable in the marketplace and that, at this stage, requires a growing community. It requires changing hearts and minds by making it easier to choose Flex for organizations and as much as it pains me to say, if Adobe has now become a bottleneck to that happening, we need to move forward without them and integrate any additional work they make available when it is available. If there are things we absolutely need from Adobe - lets prioritize them and ask for them or build them ourselves. If there is more to come, lets create a branch for Adobe that is pristine to commit to and figure out what to do with those commits when they happen instead of holding up community progress waiting for them. Please understand I mean absolutely no disrespect to folks like Alex, Carol and others who are clearly doing everything in their power to make this transition happen quickly and I appreciate their tremendous effort and constant communication on where things are and where they're going. I believe them to be an invaluable resource and hope that they are made available to the community for a long, long time. I've seen numerous component and layout proposals get raised up only to wither and die because nobody knows what to do with them. Where do they belong? Even if they belong in the "main" SDK, they can't because that is locked down for Adobe's commit. Do we need four different color pickers? Probably not, but its better than zero. If they don't belong in the "main" SDK then where? I don't feel like "something else" is a valid answer here. Where should they be committed? Its been over a month since the initial framework commit and nothing has changed. Is that a valid representation of the discussion and effort put forth by the community? I'm perfectly willing to admit that I may be completely out to lunch on my reasoning or I may just be tilting at windmills here. It certainly wouldn't be the first time I missed the big picture and will *gladly* retract everything I've said if and when I'm proven wrong. That said, can we please come to some actionable decisions and, you know, act on them?
