> > I can't imagine it would be ever be in Adobe's interest in breaking > the web by somehow trying to break existing installs of Flash Player or > prevent future installs.
Michael, you'll soon come to learn that this is the Adobe party line about the Flash/Flex relationship. Adobe has no interest in "breaking the web" so Adobe won't decide to make older content produced for Flash player (like the swfs you create today) stop working at any point in the near or semi long term future. I think this is true and fairly logical/rational. The difficulty comes in when the definition of "the web" starts changing and we start getting more and more "web browsers" that don't support flash out of the box (and which Adobe has clearly decided not to ever support going forward). So we already know that mobile browsers on Android no longer count (no Flash on Chrome for Android, and no updates now on any Android browsers going forward). And of course Safari on iOS is the obvious one. But in my mind the big question is what starts happening when there are more and more screens used for accessing the web that are born without Flash support and are guaranteed now to never get it? Your Flex apps, as they are today, will continue to work on the browsers that you know today (IE/Chrome/FF/Opera/etc/etc) running on "desktop" or "laptop" computers that you know today. I think everyone agrees that anything beyond that is completely up in the air. Adobe doesn't need to stop existing Flash content working where it used to work to kill Flash. We just have to get to a point where the majority of (new) web browsers don't support it from the start. All that said, Flex today remains an incredibly viable choice for many business apps. I say that as someone currently developing and maintaining a lage-scale Flex app. I'm definitely not trying to be uber-pessimistic here, just realistic. Although you'll certainly get more positive spins on the whole Adobe situation from others on this list. But your concerns are valid, they are very real, and despite those concerns Flex may still be the right choice now and the right choice over the next few years as things progress (which is the conclusion I've made myself).
