Why? as we said it before, its only to get rid of Adobe's runtime for
the long term future of flex.
The last year should have convinced you thats its too dangerous to be so
dependant to Adobes decisions.
And no one wants to turn the AS3/MXML code to HTML/JS. its only an
alternative as a runtime. You would still use the same AS3, the same
Flash builder.
If we have a solution like Haxe, we can debug in a local native output,
and use the HTML/JS output only as a release.
"Flash builder with a pretty nice, WYSIWYG GUI builder"
but you don't get it anymore in the next flash builder versions, because
of the Adobe's strategy shift.
"the code you run/debug will not be the actual code you wrote"
but if you take the fact that the plugin word is getting to an end,
theres not much choices left. and you have to rely on a new layer which
will replace the plugin.
"like the man said, if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Again, the flex future is broken, and we have to fix it.
Le 17/11/2012 15:30, Hordur Thordarson a écrit :
if all says that HTML5 is not ready yet for RIA and enterprise apps that flex
can do very well, why the hell would we try to render flex on HTML5 engine for
My question exactly, why the heck, when we have the best cross-platform UI lib
out there with allready pretty darn good deployment options (from a
technical/ubiquity perspective), do we want to go and turn our AS3/MXML code
into HTML and JavaScript for running in the browser? If the only thing that is
gained by that is to get rid of the Adobe VM dependency then I say we're giving
up much more than we are getting.
I'm using Flex and deploying to Flash player / AIR specifically so I don't have
to deal with HTML/JS/CSS. And someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but
currently I have an excellent debugging experience for my Flex apps with
FlashBuilder and Flash player, I can set breakpoints, step through my code etc,
works like a charm. If Flex is rewritten and the decision is made to compile
to HTML/JS, as far as I can see, this experience has been downgraded
significantly because now I have to debug generated HTML/JS code, not my own
code. This is the problem with cross-compilation.
Also, what would the experience be on the dev tools side ? Currently we have
Flash builder with a pretty nice, WYSIWYG GUI builder and as I said, a pretty
nice compile-run-debug experience. If Flex is ported to Haxe or some other
language, we are back to square one as far as this is concerned. If Flex
sticks to AS3/MXML but then gets cross-compiled into HTML/JS, then as I said
above, the code you run/debug will not be the actual code you wrote. All sorts
of new problems will follow.
I'm really hoping I'm wrong and way to pessimistic about all this, and will
happily change my views on this if someone shows me some evidence that even
though Flex is rewritten and the Adobe dependency ditched, we will not loose
the nice dev experience that Flex has today.
I'm a Apple/Mac guy and have been since the days of the Apple II. I've been
programming for about as long. And as such, I've often had the problem that I
wanted to develop on my Mac but be able to deploy to Windows, or both. Out of
the countless number of frameworks and tools and programming languages that
I've tried through the years, nothing at all matches the Flex/Flash player/AIR
combo. Nothing, period. And I think we owe it to Flex to not just cut out
most of what makes it great just to get rid of the Adobe dependency. At the
very least, if a totally new Flex is started, possibly with another programming
language and deployment runtime, I would hope that there would also be an
ongoing lobbying effort concerned with showing Adobe what a great use of Flash
player and AIR the Flex framework is, because there is nothing seriously wrong
with the Flex platform as it is, and like the man said, if it ain't broke,
don't fix it :-)
On 17.11.2012, at 13:54, sébastien Paturel wrote:
i was in fact talking about enterprise app.
it is already quite rapidly heavy perf consuming.
if all says that HTML5 is not ready yet for RIA and enterprise apps that flex
can do very well, why the hell would we try to render flex on HTML5 engine for
native apps.
I was talking about 3D rendering, in a starling sens, as a background rendering
engine, not as application.
Le 17/11/2012 14:25, Nils Dupont a écrit :
It really depends on which kind of application you want to deploy. I was
more thinking of common "entreprise" oriented applications, e.g. a few
views, with a few lists and a few forms. For 3D rendering I agree that it
is not the best way to go.
2012/11/17 sébastien Paturel <sebpatu.f...@gmail.com>
Does not cordova only launch a web browser wrapped in an native app?
If so, its very bad result in terms of performances right?
in a native app environement, we can leverage from 3D rendering (the best
performances), but with cordova solution, we will use the lowest performant
renderer available, the HTML5 renderer.
it does not sound very promising to me, but maybe i'm wrong.
Le 17/11/2012 14:14, Nils Dupont a écrit :
Has anyone tried to make a bridge between Apache Flex and Apache Cordova?
I mean generating an Apache Cordova HTML5/JS application from a Flex
Mobile
MXML/AS3 application (at least for a subset of Flex Mobile components e.g.
views & transitions, lists, input controls, native APIs access, web
service
access, etc.)
Apache Cordova has the advantage to be able to target 7 different mobile
OS
and of course is open source.
For the UI controls, it is possible to use different librairies (JQuery
UI,
Twitter Bootstrap, etc.)
Maybe it is also an other way to consider in order to be able to deploy
Flex Mobile applications to mobile devices without
the use of Air runtime?
Nils
NB: Concerning desktop applications, Flash Player remains, in my opinion,
the best way to deploy cross-browser applications.
2012/11/17 Maxime Cowez <maxime.co...@gmail.com>
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.
