

It's not just Flash for Mobile, Flex is dead too - thepumpkin1979
http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html

======
pcestrada
I spent the last 3 years developing complex data visualization apps. We had
strict constraints as to what kind of browsers we could expect(think
government agencies) hence our use of Flash/Flex to build the rich apps our
customers required. Flex helped us build some really cool stuff quickly, and
had a rich ecosystem of tools, resources, and examples to draw upon. I'm
really disappointed that Adobe didn't even provide some sort of gradual
migration strategy. They basically took the only parachute in the airplane and
jumped, yelling, "We are going to make it open source!" on the way out.

I have a difficult conversation waiting for me on Monday with my boss when I
explain that our significant code base is now part of a legacy platform that
the vendor has jettisoned. The software industry has an interesting gambling
component: you bet on which language/technology/platform is going to be
popular and hope for the best. Looks like I rolled snake-eyes.

~~~
dewiz
Sorry mate, ever heard of vendor lock-in ? This is what happens adopting
closed source technologies, they sounds great to start, then ... here you are.

Migrating to community-supported-free-open-source technologies "suddenly"
makes sense.

~~~
wladimir
Wasn't flex also open source at some point? I remember there was some hype
about it a few years ago. At least the compiler and SDK were opened.

Back then I played around with it a bit and eventually concluded the new AS
was basically a re-do of the Java language, library and ecosystem (even the
bytecode was similar). I know there is a curse on Java in the browser, and
making it look like Java helps enterprise adoption, but mirroring Java to that
degree looked like a bit of a wasted effort.

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uptown
I built a number of visualization and charting tools for a client of mine
using Flex. They worked well, but printing was always problematic and once
iPads started emerging, the "this won't work there" problem reared its head.
The fix for me was to go back and re-implement what I'd built using Flot ...
an HTML5-based visualization library. Migration was simple ... maintenance is
much easier, and performance-wise, it loads faster than Flex ever did. For
anyone in the same boat, I highly recommend checking Flot out.

~~~
mjbellantoni
In the environment where I used Flex printing was always a problem as well.
There was an (understandable) expectation that they should be able to print
out a meaningful representation of what they saw on the screen. A _huge_
source of pain.

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jphackworth
From the article:

 _Is Adobe still committed to Flex?_

 _Yes._

Seems like putting "Flex is dead" in the title is too much editorializing.

~~~
SnowLprd
I believe the title is accurate. As with their last post regarding the death
of mobile Flash, Adobe seems to have an unfortunate penchant for ambiguous
language. Rather than just coming out and saying that they are putting Flex
out to pasture and wish it well, they spin the news by reaffirming their
commitment to Flex while admitting that the Flex team is moving to HTML-based
projects. It's a confusing, seemingly contradictory message.

That said, I think it's admirable that Adobe is handing over stewardship of
Flex to the Apache Foundation instead of just killing it outright. They should
be commended for that, since many other companies seem unwilling to so. But
given the long-term trajectory of technology trends, it does indeed seem
likely that Flex's days are numbered.

~~~
wurka
It is not accurate, it's a lie. The product hasn't been cancelled, the SDK
will continue to be developed. Which bit didn't you read?

~~~
veemjeem
Just like google wave isn't dead yet -- the apache foundation will continue
wave... yeah, it's dead jim.

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frou_dh
I don't even know what Flex is. Yes, that's ultimately ignorance on my part,
but it's not the case with most other dev tech.

~~~
Fizzer
Flex is a library that sits on top of Flash that provides controls and a
layout system.

Flash itself doesn't have the concept of a checkbox, drop down list, grids or
any controls beyond a button. Flex adds these.

Flash also doesn't have any sort of layout system other than absolute
positioning. Flex adds various layout controls.

It works pretty well, but also increases the size of your .swf file quite a
bit.

~~~
Achshar
So flex is to flash what DOM and CSS are to JavaScript? [coming from someone
who has never done flash but loads of html5/js]

~~~
Volpe
No. More like if you wrote a toolkit for displaying ui items in canvas (I
think Mozilla did this with Ace/Bespin/Skywriter/whatever-its-called), then it
would be equivalent to flex.

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drawkbox
Pulling out of mobile, which is the present and future, hints a little at
Adobe's focus now. Flash seems to have lost with mobile and now Flex being
pulled, how long before desktop is EOL or sunsetted?

Flash 11 and Stage3D seemed a promising alternative to WebGL or competitive
player, which will they choose there? Google had O3D and chose WebGL. But
Flash would have supported IE and Unity and Unreal have committed to exporting
to it since it is a low level and compiled render engine, it may be faster
than WebGL with just javascript for some time or more steady across all
browsers like Unity. Anyways, lots of questions on Adobe's direction...
standards or not? and which ones?

~~~
chadaustin
Flash 11 and Stage3D aren't just a promising alternative to WebGL: they're the
only viable alternative. WebGL only works in Firefox and Chrome (50% of the
market) and, further, half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern
or secure enough GPUs or drivers to use WebGL.

Said plainly, WebGL only hits 1/4 of the desktop market. Stage3D/AGAL, on the
other hand, are well designed and have an automatic software fallback. It will
work on every machine, with one of the fastest software renderers known to me
(I believe it's SwiftShader, please respond if you know more).

I really hope Flash 11 doesn't go away anytime soon because WebGL just isn't
ready for ubiquity.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern or secure enough GPUs
> or drivers to use WebGL

Fixed with current Firefox, as far as I know. The first release of Firefox
with WebGL had an awful whitelist/blacklist system for video drivers,
primarily due to them crashing when asked to do relatively basic
initialization and operations. Now, Firefox has a sensible probing mechanism
for video drivers, and as a result, almost any modern video driver will work
just fine. (Certainly anything new enough to run OpenGL 2.0, which means all
the graphics chipsets sold today, and those sold in the last few years.)
Intel, ATI, and nVidia chipsets all work just fine; those represent the vast
majority of the market at this point.

(Also, if a user's graphics drivers don't provide enough stability or security
to work with WebGL, Flash won't improve that situation either.)

As for browser support, right now it works in released versions of Firefox and
Chrome, and preview versions of Opera and desktop Safari. iOS 5 supports WebGL
for iAds, and web content will likely follow soon; people have already figured
out how to make it work using private APIs. As far as I know, current Android
releases support WebGL as well. So, as usual, that just leaves Internet
Explorer. (And even IE users have several possible alternatives, quite apart
from upgrading to a better browser: plugins like IEWebGL, Chrome Frame, and
even some attempts to use Java or Flash as a fallback.)

So, while WebGL support does need a bit more time to become sufficiently
widespread, it seems likely to do so in the near future.

~~~
chadaustin
You missed my point entirely. Even if Flash has the same blacklist as
Firefox/Chrome, it has a high-performance software implementation, meaning you
can hit the entire market with Flash 11. Until IE gets WebGL, everyone out
there updates their drivers, and the Intel GMA950 is no longer the top video
card, WebGL just isn't ubiquitous enough.

------
Garbage
As Adobe mentioned, they are going to donate Flex SDK to community. Developing
SDK is not a major problem. But development of underlying platform is. Can
community trust Adobe that Flash Player runtime will be around for a longer
time?

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sdoowpilihp
As someone that has worked around and with flash for years, I say good
riddance. Though there are portions of the flash 'product' I think are much
stronger than HTML5 and javascript (specifically, I feel that actionscript 3
is lightyears ahead of javascript), Flex was always one of the weaker parts.
It always came off as half baked and did not blend well with everything else.
The whole concept of MXML files was ridiculously obtuse and only led to
unmaintainable code.

~~~
pnathan
I did some work with flex/mxml stuff about a year and a half ago, and frankly,
it ranks as the worst software development environment I have had the
displeasure to use. This includes the 8086 chip with 1 LED for debugging.

~~~
macspoofing
Hyperbole much? Having done UI work widt GTK and Swing, I can tell you that
Flex (especially the newer spark component set) is much nicer.

------
christoph
Sorry, but I'm failing to see how this means it's dead... Things might change,
but die?

Sounds a lot like people making things up to me...

~~~
dextorious
Not good at this "reading between the lines" or even "facing the blatantly
obvious" thing, then, eh?

What part of:

"Does Adobe recommend we use Flex or HTML5 for our enterprise application
development?

In the long-term, we believe ##HTML5 will be the best technology## for
enterprise application development.

We also know that, ##currently##, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale
client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles."

Is hard to grasp?

~~~
christoph
It's a mature open-source framework - the Flash Player is getting some
significant upgrades (Unity + Unreal engine with Stage3D), allowing many
things not possible now, tomorrow or next year with HTML5/Js. I know I'll be
using it on our projects this time next year, as will numerous other codeshops
like ours.

This is all before you look at what becomes possible with executables created
with 3rd party tools like SWFStudio & Zinc (where we roll our own native code
into the release).

Sorry, but even this time next year, there's going to be nothing around that
approaches what we are doing with these tools now, in the timeframes and
budgets we are doing them in (this part is key for our customers) - believe
me, we've evaluated all of them long & hard.

Just because it might be the end of Flex for you and your projects, it's not
going away overnight for many other developers.

------
itsnotvalid
_" In fact, many of the engineers and product managers who worked on Flex SDK
will be moving to work on our HTML efforts."_

Hell yes.

------
teyc
With both Silverlight and Flex gone, the roadmap for future projects is clear:
It will be HTML5. Unfortunately, what is not clear is which HTML5 runtime. In
many ways, Safari enjoys the greatest reach - runs on Apples and Windows.
Presumably Windows 8 will lock out Safari, which means we still have to
support Safari and IE10. And we still haven't figured out where Android
browsers fit in.

Perhaps Adobe's tool will be able to account for browser quirks better than
humans can. We can all hope.

~~~
icebraining
_Presumably Windows 8 will lock out Safari_

Hmm? Why?

~~~
richbradshaw
In Metro, IE is tied in pretty well, and currently there aren't any other
browsers that work in Metro. On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have
to be compiled to run on ARM processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry
is perhaps higher than now.

I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS
doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad,
where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a
different rendering engine.

Good job IE10 looks like it will be pretty good!

~~~
icebraining
IE was always tied to Windows, but that never prevented other browsers from
running.

 _On tablets (only Metro), the browser would have to be compiled to run on ARM
processors (assumedly), so the barrier to entry is perhaps higher than now._

Sure, but that's hardly locking browsers out, and besides Mobile Safari
already runs on ARM (as does Firefox).

 _I think that it's likely there will be alternative browsers (assuming MS
doesn't lock them out), but it may well be a similar situation to the iPad,
where these browsers are really just a skinned UIWebView, rather than a
different rendering engine._

But why? Just because Apple locks other browsers, MS will too? I don't get why
you assume that.

------
wavephorm
I just wish people wouldn't criticise Adobe for making these difficult (but
correct) decisions. They see the writing on the wall as clearly as everyone
else. HTML5 and WebGL is what the rest of the computing industry is moving
toward, and Flash is long in the tooth and the wrong development model for the
future of the web. Flash served its purpose as a stop-gap techology until the
web caught up. It's time to move on and we should thank Adobe for not
prolonging this transition any further.

~~~
incongruity
Heck, I'll go so far as to _praise_ Adobe. While it's easy to "see the writing
on the wall" from out here, history seems to say that it's often really hard
for companies with dominant/historically strong positions in a market to see
that revolution before it completely passes them by... I think Adobe has been
more quick to change than many large/dominant companies in tech and other
industries in years past.

~~~
sjs
Everyone is better off with Adobe on the "same team". They were trying to swim
upstream and they knew it. The web dev world was marching forward with or
without them and I'm glad they made the difficult but correct decision to
embrace what is clearly the future.

Despite the widespread hatred for the Flash runtime it's almost universally
agreed that Adobe makes great tools to create Flash things, and now we have
them making those tools for the web. Which is also widely acknowledged as a
giant hole in the modern web dev process. This really is a good thing for
almost everyone as far as I can see.

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shareme
for those jumping to html5 on mobile..

If you can avoid manipulating the DOM or use a framework that avoids
manipulating the DOM you will get fast applications...

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wurka
The SDK will continue to be developed, the roadmap for the commercial product
will be outlined. What I'm missing here? Pro-Apple troll. Go away. Who was the
idiot that crafted the headline?

~~~
macspoofing
>What I'm missing here?

They're essentially pulling funding and engineering talent from Flex
Development, and made it clear that they see HTML5 as the future.

------
Garbage
Slightly offtopic, but those who wants to move on with HTML5, I found
<http://www.html5rocks.com/en/> is a very good resource to learn about HTML5.

------
SimHacker
Does anyone else have the feeling that Adobe was just waiting for Steve Jobs
to die before they killed Flash, just to avoid giving him the pleasure? He
would have been delighted that he won. ;)

