> Are developers on this list still able to earn a living building new Flex apps, or are you maintaining old ones?
I was actually hired 9 months ago by my current company to set up a new Flex development branch, as they wanted a share of the market in that area. As such I am mainly creating new "enterprise" apps for government clients so I can take full advantage of Spark and don't have to worry about legacy too much. From my experience in that short amount of time I can tell you this: we started by creating small(-ish), fairly risc-free projects, which we could deliver with very good quality and on time even though on a tight deadline. Because of Flex's RAD (rapid application development) possibilities we were able to use prototypes to discuss functionality early in the development process. All of which lead to very satisfied customers, of which some were known to be "clients from hell". Bigger orders are rolling in as we speak. I'd like to highlight one specific approach we took in selling Flex: a customer wanted us specifically to use Dojo as a technology. We took the risk to develop a small prototype in Flex and presented it to them. They saw immediately that the UX was far superior to what they were used to. And we told them we could *perhaps* deliver the same with Dojo, but it would cost them at least twice as much (which is a true estimate - not just for selling purposes - and we had just proven by delivering the prototype in no time). They did not have to think very long about it... We've been trying out various enterprise-level HMTL5/JS frameworks and the truth is, none of them comes even close to what Flex can do in terms of stability, possibilities, performance and most importantly (for the customer) development time. And yes I've included performance in that list: none of those enterprise-level frameworks have decent performance compared to Flex when presenting lots of data; I'm only speaking of classic web-applications here. @paul There's a team not far from my desk that's making a GIS application with GWT: the project is a total mess and we're loosing money on it. To sum it up: from my experience Flex as it is now still can be sold in markets that are not too sensitive to buzzwords. On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 9:34 AM, Paul Hastings <paul.hasti...@gmail.com>wrote: > Are developers on this list still able to earn a living building new Flex >>> apps, or are you maintaining old ones? >>> >> > in our neck of the woods flex is still kind of king for old school GIS > applications (analytical/decision support/etc.) especially w/ESRI backends. > mainly for desktops & some stripped down functionality for tablets--much of > the processing is shared between client & backends. > > while i'm sure there are some big/complex JS/JTML5 apps for this market > somewhere, haven't actually seen any. > >
