All,
Some of you may have seen tweets and emails concerning a Apache Flex
Steering Survey which currently has more than 375 respondents since July
26th.
With the successful release of Apache Flex 4.8.0-incubating (previously
announced below) it is timely to have a discussion/consensus around the
priorities going forward. Below is a link to a survey that will help
guide discussions on objectives, priorities, features and functions
(roadmap) that can guide effort over the next 6-12 months. This survey
is 8 questions and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. Your
input is extremely important to the project - thank you for your time.
The survey will be open until Aug 21st.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TWTJ2VS
More background:
The Apache Flex Steering Survey is being organized and executed by
members of the 'Open Spoon Foundation' (www.spoon.as) and affiliates in
support of the Apache Flex Project. The Foundation (not-for-profit
foundation) setup by the Adobe community in 2011 to capture the
collective experience of those individuals implementing solutions on the
Flex framework and to apply that knowledge in a constructive manner
through defect patching, feature contribution and addressing aspects of
the framework that limit extensibility. Spoon's has a membership of
several hundred and growing (a number of who are Apache Flex committers
and PMC members). The survey is part of an effort to bring the community
together, plan and organize ourselves to move forward from the recent
4.8.0-incubating release. The next 6 months will be an important stage
for Apache Flex during which Adobe's code/effort donations will be
finalized and the first true 'new' release will be undertaken. It is
also a critical time in the market to begin rebuilding interest and
commitment in the technology. The chances of success at this environment
will be greatly improved by a coordinated community effort towards the
right objectives, which is what the steering survey is going to
contribute towards. The survey is live right now & will remain open
until August 21st, the data is meant to be used by Spoon and the Apache
Flex project. No commercial or personal information will be shared
publically, only aggregated results for the purpose of defining
objectives, features and functions as part of the roadmap
planning/organizing discussion.
On 7/25/2012 12:25 PM, Keith Sutton wrote:
With the successful release of 4.8.0-incubating it would be timely to
have a discussion/consensus around the priorities going forward.
A couple of fundamental factors should be considered in this discussion:
1) Adobe resources are not indefinite and from statements made
early in the year it is possible they may no longer be available
within 6+/- months (plan for the worst case). Once these resources
are gone it will be significantly harder to access/transition code
assets;
2) Successful open source projects/communities are commercially
viable, as much as open source is about cool technologies and code
it is also about having the resources to do what they want for as
long as they want;
3) Within the Fortune 1000 companies which has the greater
installed base and therefore need for support/transition - Flex 3;
4) This is not a typical open source project that grows over time,
this is a commercially viable product with a significant customer
base and ecosystem, Apache Flex does not have the luxury of time
as organizations wrestle with the decisions in the 6-12 months
over Flex versus HTML5/JS/CSS (hope is not a roadmap).
After gleaning through emails and blog posts the following is a list
of potential things-to-do-next (please identify anything needing
addition/deletion). When considering what is a priority, ask yourself
'is this essential to Apache Flex success beyond the next 6-12 months':
1) 4.6 ViewStack
2) 4.6 Accordion
3) 4.6 DateField
4) 4.6 DataChooser
5) 4.6 Enhanced DataGrid
6) 4.6 missing automation libraries
7) 4.6 missing fabridge
8) 4.6 missing flash-integration
9) 4.6 missing samples
10) 4.6 missing embedded font support
11) 3.x Flex SDK
12) Flex compiler source code
13) BlazeDS/BlazeDS.NET
14) TLF
15) Gravity
16) FXG
17) Squiggles
18) OSMF
Notes:
Falcon and Falcon JS are not on the list until Q4 2012 and beyond
Adobe "Not be contributing the AIR for Linux SDK, LCDS, or LCCS to Apache"
Adobe "will ensure that the Adobe Flex SDK 4.6 and prior will be
supported in future versions of Flash Player and AIR
Adobe "plans to maintain support for Flex projects in updates to Flash
Builder 4.x"
