

Ask HN: Any thoughts about Adobe Flex/AIR for cross-mobile (non-game) app dev? - zura

I need some good (component based, static typing) cross-platform (android&#x2F;ios) app dev solution. ActionScript 3 seems a good language with static typing. And Flex&#x2F;AIR seems quite nice to me. Another alternative could be MoSync (C++ based), but it is not maintained anymore, unfortunately...<p>So what do you think about Flex&#x2F;AIR way? Would you start a new project with it?
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Matthias247
We used AIR for making graphical user interfaces on embedded devices. From a
technical point of view I can only recommend it: AS3 is a good language, Flex
and MXML are easy and straightforward to work with and there is good tooling
included.

However the downside of AIR is really future-proofness: Thanks to bad
publicity and the assumptions that all flash can be easily replaced by HTML5
the development of AIR is continuosly phased out. E.g. AIR for Linux (not
Android) is already no longer supported. I don't know how active the
development now is under the Apache umbrella.

Alternatives would be: \- Xamarin (.NET) \- QT (i enjoyed it less then AIR
because you have to switch between C++ and Javascript whereas in AIR you can
implement your whole app in a single language) \- use one of the HTML5
frameworks in combination with typescript (you will need quite a lot of JS
libs to get what AIR brings you straight out of the box - but on the other
hand you are more flexible to choose what suits your needs)

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daven11
I looked at flex/air a year or so ago for the same requirements - ended up
using Delphi. It was uncertain at the time whether flex/air would be around
(it may be different now), also Delphi has a very mature 3rd party component
market.

