And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework
Making simple CRUD SPAs using HTML5/CSS3/JS/whatever frameworks is way more complicated than using AS3 to do the same thing.
It all feels like a giant kludge.
What have we gained by going into using modern web stack to make application like pages?
Perhaps source is shared more freely and code is more "open", but as the React licensing ruckus shows that is not clear cut.
We have certainly not gained more consistency over AS3.
There really wasn't anything wrong with the idea of flash compiler doing the heavy lifting for app like pages.
AS3 is one of the best languages I've ever used. Easy to use, dynamic but also statically typed when you want it with many of features from Java and C# which still aren't available in JS.
I wrote this a couple of months back: https://medium.com/@Pier/ecmascript-4-was-too-ahead-of-its-t...
Either could have been adopted. Would still love to see an HTML "package" format that was similar, where the whole content and assets could be downloaded as a single container, and run offline easily like flash could.
It was a risk not supporting Flash in 2007, one that has paid off in Spades. Apple made the right choice for Apple.
In retrospect, Macromedia would have needed to open source Flash, and aim it as a viable open web standard circa 2007 or 2008 (making it even more difficult for Apple to reject). This would have required starting the process in 2003 or 2004 at the latest. But IE6 was still dominant in 2003/2004, Firefox's success was far from assured, and open web standards were a joke.
The original iPhone was amazing in 2007, it was really a game changer for the open web. I don't think Macromedia could have anticipated the reasoning behind the death of Flash in 2003, never mind make the contemporary case to save it...
The real question I have is: Has Adobe ported their Flash dev tools to produce HTML5/JS/CSS? Are they as good the Flash version, and do they provide most of the same features? I ask because that shift has been foreseeable, and should have been a top priority (to minimize the rise of alternative platforms).
Additionally, I'll add that we can use Adobe AIR to build native apps for iOS or Android or Desktop computers and that's been around for even longer.
It was quite nice to use client-side in Flash and AIR for such things as SOAP etc. but it is also quite powerful when used server-side for web scrapping and HTML templating.
I see that every day with Redtamarin
https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
it does only AS3 on the command-line, there is no GUI rendering of any kind, and yet the programming language that is AS3 shine.
And thanks to JavaScript VM performance, running the same code is ahead of what the Flash VM could do.
AS3 was way ahead of its time when introduced, but browsers have moved past it since it stopped evolving.
Flex vs frameworks is more of a matter of preference and contextual requirements so I can't comment on that.
Sure, but that's the comparison invited when one says that AS3 is still better than what's out there today.
I built an app with Flex Builder that got me my first job. The application is still in heavy use every day, and I've never even once had someone report that something went wrong with it.
not bashing flash/flex though, my first job was making educational flash games. I wish I could be as productive and have as much fun when working in html and js.
AS3 was awesome for its time but TypeScript has surpassed it in my opinion.
After building up components directly in the language with React there's no way I could go back to using Flex.
I did find some object model inconsistencies annoying all the same, and some of the security implications in the early 00's frankly scared me. Even though I worked with it, I disabled it.
React + JS is nice, but the animation tooling in Flash itself was second to none. And still better than many options. If I still made a lot of elearning content, I'd be much more upset by the fall of flash.