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On 8/7/2012 8:52 AM, Daniel Harfleet wrote:
Mike's statement "I am sure there are customers using it" has reminded me a
thought I had about the 'survey' which I wanted to share...
Many members on this list have probably felt an impact on their livelihood as a
result of the changes relating to Adobe's actions around Flex. My primary
motivation in committing to work in my spare time on Apache Flex would be to
help ensure the longevity of Flex and hence my livelihood (although I recognize
and respect for some it may be more oriented towards hobby/interest/other).
Although the survey attempts to get to the bottom of feature priorities, I
can't help feeling that we should be including parties other than this mailing
list to take part in the survey. Although many of this list's participants
including myself have an exposure to a subset of the corporate users
requirements, does anyone have any ideas how we could ( and if we should ) be
trying to include the high paying end customers in our surveys ? i.e. the big
corporations that were (and in some cases are) spending money on Flex
development ? Is this information Spoon can get access to through their network?
>> I couldn't agree more with this but, I think Apache Flex has to get
to a point where it has something to offer those corporate users over
and above 4.6. With the release of 4.8.-incubating we are definitely
closer to that point and will likely get there in the next release. At
that point (and working up to it) we should be able to go out to those
corporate users with not just a message but a product. Fundamentally, Q1
in the survey is about digging out what is "essential to commercial /
economic success for Apache Flex within the next 6-12 months".
>> I believe there are lines of communication to 'corporate users' from
within the network of Spoon, 3rd party product vendors, service
providers and people on this list which we can follow but this needs to
be done in an organized fashion. Typically with successful open source
initiatives this is undertaken by a commercial entity associated with
the project that builds offerings on top of the project (ex hadoop >>
cloudera, spring >> springsource). This is something Spoon is thinking
about how to get started.
For example only, I personally can see a big benefit to putting effort into
FalconJS, but it may be that 9 out 10 large spenders in Flex development may
actually not care about HTML/JS and are more concerned about performance
increases/additional components/bug fixes, etc ?
>> Agree, no technology is good at everything, with FalconJS we could
offer a path from Flex for those things that HTML5/JS does better. I
can't think of a better bunch of people to define/adopt a JS framework
than the people on this list.
Obviously I appreciate that some of these large spending corporations will have
members monitoring this list, but some may not as they probably relied on Adobe
(and partners) sales & marketing effort to keep them posted.
>> Agree, AF is in a unique situation, it has an established
user-based, we just need to get organized to access and inform it.
I am not saying I like the idea of a 'roadmap', but I do like the idea of a
'picklist' of features that paying organizations have stated an interest in.
As much as I appreciate the effort which has been put into the survey, I can't
help feeling it is a little bit leaning towards some kind of 'progress report'
on Adobe donations rather than a focus on whats next.
>> Agreed, but it is a good place to start/clarify. One of the things
coming out of the survey is the 'other' things people think are
important and that is going to be a good basis for discussion on what is
next for non-Adobe people to work on.
dan
