We’re a reasonably big investor in Flash / Flex, as we build the majority of our user-interfaces in it. So clearly we have an interest in Adobe apparently going into headless-chicken mode, first committing to the platform, then being so committed it’s being dumped into Apache or other parking spot.
Now, I’m not particularly surprised – this was always likely to be the endgame. What I am surprised by is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be a coherent post-flex story coming out of Adobe. There are mentions of MXML/HTML5 ‘conversion’, but no information other than that. What you’re supposed to do in these scenarios is to present your next-generation tools at the same time as deprecating your existing toolset. I think not to do so is a bad strategy for Adobe.
Stepping back for one moment – why do we use Flex at all? It clearly has disadvantages; but despite the anti-flash sentiments from the peanut gallery (who may well have never used a flex application in their life), it actually represented a good choice for a startup business building intranet targetted applications for customers who were tied to IE6. Adam Flater sums these advantages (and disadvantages) up very well in his blog post:
The main benefits of Flex in it’s prime:
- A standard user interface component set
- Remoting (the ability to interface with web services via transferring typed objects)
- A better skinning and styling workflow (than HTML/CSS at the time)
- Efficient vector graphics for data visualization (charts, graphs, etc)
We’ve found it a relatively pleasant way of constructing applications – certainly it enables us to be very agile in changing how the UI works, even with a small development team. I often wonder if the ‘you should use jQuery / HTML5 / the new Hotness This Week’ crowd have ever actually written a web UI at “application” scale, rather than believing that a single-developer Web2.0 ‘todo list’ is representative of the challenges building full-scale applications present.
Back when we started 4+ years ago, we looked at the available alternatives. I hate (and still hate) Javascript. I liked GWT, I just thought Flex was a better choice for us. And just because Adobe aren’t going to make any more of it, doesn’t mean we suddenly have to find an alternative right now any more than the fact Ford don’t make my model of car any more. I can still drive to the shops. I can still put fuel in it. I can still buy spare parts. All that’s happened is I now know how many miles are on the clock.
Indeed, I can understand why Adobe are probably doing this – there’s no money to be made here. Unfortunately the timing and poor message has probably just blown any opportunity of making money in the future, because they’re moving from a “Flex tools > HTML tools” world and into an “Adobe HTML tools > everyone else’s HTML tools”. But the signs there don’t look too great. CS5 sucks; the UI is an unusable mess. Dreamweaver is awful. Flex builder is ‘adequate’ at best.
I think there will be a lot of knee-jerk migrations that happen very quickly. Myself, I think we have about 18 months to decide on what the next generation platform is to build on. My early guess though : Google’s Dart. If you watch this talk about Google’s closure tools, and then think about Dart it makes sense as a strategy. I look at it and intrinsically feel like the problems they have are the same as the problems that I have.
So, if I were Adobe, I’d have announced a complementary product that did AS3->JS compilation (such as Jangaroo), a rich HTML5 widget set, and libraries for AMF remoting. Dart is pretty immature right now – AS3 basically has all the features that people would want. But I have a feeling that by the time Adobe finally work out what they’re doing, the advantages that Flex had over HTML5 will be solved by other, free tools, and their customers that were on flex will already have migrated to something else.
