Hi, I want to share some thoughts that I have since August... maybe exposing here could make us debate over the problems and see what is happening with this project. Maybe Apache Flex is going forward, but my sense is it's not. Maybe committers could share what they see.
My overall feeling is that Flex is a complex project and contribute need lots of things on board since you, as a contributor, need to be comfortable and have time to invest. The actual model in Apache is very old and is proving to be a failure in actual days. The fact that we don't have a valid workflow based on the voted option some months ago with Git, Github and nvie Git branching model is one of the things that is making this project fail. People is moving from Flex to HTML5 and this migration seems not to stop although what they could get in that world is a real pain compared with Flex development workflows. People staying are the teams and developers that comes from IT sector and wants an OOP robust framework and technology with lots of commodities like AMF, Annotations and so on. Things that still exist in Flex nowadays. Tickets voted in JIRA by community out there still are not closed successfully (Maven deployment,...), maybe because actual committers have another concept of what Flex should be and invest the time in other things, and people that could enter the project to make that happen couldn't enter since the Apache model makes it very hard (and that people ends investing their time in other things that have more possibilities). In August my coworker (Pepe Barragan) and I was trying to contribute to mustella, but the apache's workflow (and our own work) make us fall in discouragement. Finally we are unwilling to participate. As we sure there are more people. Which is not good for this project. I'm afraid that or we make some movement and recognized that this project is somewhat in bad state or we will end in Apache Flex 4.8 I'm following this list and things seems stuck since august. Another point is that apache Flex installer was reject many times so people ends passing, what again is very bad, and making developers burn out to reach RC7... The last problem I see is the heritage of adobe libraries and legal issues added that make all things go very slow or even fail to get it done. We are trying to save a great technology and if we are discussing lots of legal licenses we soon will be with a dead horse but with all documentation in order. If those legal problems (i.e: maven related) does not cause a problem for Adobe until now...less now than they want to quit from this technology. If things start to go ok, legal problems can be solved in that moment. So, after share all this issues... is Apache the best option for Flex? What do you think about it? Could we think other options to make this work in places like github or bitbucket and the return results here? Note: My intention is make us think a bit in what is happening. Maybe I'm wrong and my perception is not shared here. This would be good and will mean the project is really going on, so go forward! :). If that is not the case, and you think things are not evolving as expected, is the time to express yourself and say what you think. Only with this kind of exercise we could know more about what is really happen to Apache Flex. Thanks in advance for your thought on this topic. Best, -- Carlos Rovira
