After reading through David overview of the night it made me think about where Flex is going and what Adobe are planning on doing.
I see Adobe slowly dumping Flex completely, they are currently moving all the code base to Apache, Flash Builder may not get past version 4.7 (according to David there was no talk of a Flash Builder 5). Once all the legal issues have been solved I can see the entire code base moved into the Apache project and Adobe taking the full time developers they have put on the project off to some thing new.
At first when Adobe announced what they were going to do I was, like a lot of Flex developers, annoyed. Then as the dust settled and the Adobe evangelists tried to fix the PR mess that Adobe PR had caused, it became clear that Flash on the web is not going to be as strong and mainstream as it once has been. And that Adobe as a business need to look for other avenues (HTML 5).
So I was ok with that, I’d preferred to use Flex/AIR on mobile and tablets, its an exciting new opportunity. I could live with HTML/CSS for the web Flex/AIR for cross platform mobile development.
Now after the new Adobe tour events, it looks like the future for Flex is no longer part of Adobe’s plans.
So there are two ways this can go, one the community can take the code base, build upon it, support it, create new and improved components, grow the language. If Adobe discontinue Flash Builder or stop at version 4.7 then this is a great opportunity for another IDE company to take it’s place (Jetbrains or FDT). With the support of the Flex community Flex could really grow, but without a large organisation like Adobe I am worried that the message of ‘Flex is a good RIA alternative and well worth investing in’ will not make it to clients and companies looking to develop RIAs or mobile apps.
Without this client base I think Flex could eventually fade away as developers move away from it as they cannot find the work where Flex is needed.
Who’s going to take this lead that Adobe have I’m not sure?
No comments:
Post a Comment