On 20.11.2012, at 22:14, Kevin Newman wrote: > Mark Zuckerberg also said very publicly that Facebook "burned" (his word) 2 > years of development with HTML5, "We burned two years. That's really painful. > Probably we will look back saying that is one of the *biggest mistakes* if > not *the biggest strategic mistake* that we made." It was less of a "cave" > and more of a fundamental shift in understanding (and a correct one).
Agreed and that's really what I ment by "caved in", they just realized it was never going to be as good as a native app. The problem with HTML5/JS as an app mechanism is that it just wasn't designed for that. Some changes have been made to it in order to make it easier to write applications (as opposed to web sites which is a totally different thing) but it really isn't very good for that at all except maybe for small apps. The JavaFX crowd is having the exact same discussion the Flex crowd is, except pretty much no one in the JavaFX crowd wants to deploy to HTML/JS. They want JavaFX runtimes for mobile so that they can have one set of code and the same or very similar runtime everywhere (sound familiar ?). And the community is actually working towards a solution that gives them that. But Oracle, like Adobe, seems to have given into the "HTML5 for everything" rhetoric so they are at least currently not backing this. > > This is where Adobe has an opportunity with AIR, that they seem intent on > failing to capitalize on (at least in their marketing narratives, and the > signals the decision makers are sending out into the market place - the Flash > engineers are doing pretty cool stuff with stage3D and whatnot). Yep, very frustrating that Adobe gave up on this vision because they had by far the strongest dev/deployment story out there with almost the best of everything. with Flash player or AIR for the desktop and AIR for mobile and almost single source for all the platforms (UI tweaks/diffs for phones/tablets obviously). This is of course still possible, we just don't know how long it is going to last :-( But while it works, I hope Apache Flex will continue to be maintained/improved in it's current shape. > > Anyway, Apache Flex doesn't need to wait for Adobe's higher-ups to figure it > out - Flex can go HaXe, and have a multi-platform ubiquity story and an open > source story to boot. Sure. I have to say though that my clients don't really care if the tools I use are open source or not or whether the language I write in is ActionScript or Haxe or smth else. They care about functionality, usability, cross-platformness and ease of deployment/updating of the resulting product, and they also want development to cost as little as possible, hence the less problems I have during dev and the less testing I have to do in multiple browsers or with multiple runtimes, the better. > > Kevin N. > > > On 11/17/12 5:25 AM, Hordur Thordarson wrote: >> Eventually FB caved in and created a fully native app. >
