It's not just Flash for Mobile, Flex is dead too
blogs.adobe.com
blogs.adobe.com
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.
Migrating to community-supported-free-open-source technologies "suddenly" makes sense.
So, you didn't really understood that part where he wrote that for their specific requirements Flex was better suited, and enabled them to deliver stuff that they couldn't otherwise (at least without much pain)?
Also, yeah, it's like this kind of thing never happens to open source projects. Like, for example, the community loses interest and moves on, or decides to change the direction of the project to something you can't work with and don't care about, and the old platform you were building on is suddenly left to digital rot (no new features, not adapted to new environment and os releases, no more fixes, etc).
Sure, you still have the source for the old project.
But it's damn near useless unless you have the will, the knowledge, the time, and the manpower to fork it and adapt it to your needs, or the money to pay others to do it.
You have to understand that living at the whims of a volunteer community has it's own drawbacks, compared to living at the whims of a commercial company.
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.
Is Adobe still committed to Flex?
Yes.
Seems like putting "Flex is dead" in the title is too much editorializing.
It is slow death, but it is death to me.
I'd say that is a pretty clear message.
I think the post title is pertinent.
I won't comment on the semantics of whether the title is editorializing.
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.
Regarding Open Sourcing, it´s also one way to stop support sooner and avoid bad PR.
Further, I do think it says something that a large corporation, such as Adobe, is willing to open source products it's leaving behind. Shrewd move for them or not, ultimately, if most/all companies did this with the IP that they had EOL'd, I think it'd make a real difference, fostering grass-roots innovation in interesting ways.
Saying they are still committed to Flex and at the same time state that they will be moving their efforts to HTML5 sounds a mixture of cowardliness and hypocrisy.
The truth is that they will support the investment that´s been made in the short-term, but no, they are not committed to the technology anymore.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That said, SwiftShader also features an OpenGL ES 2.0 API, making it highly suitable for WebGL implementations as well. In fact Google is currently in the process of integrating SwiftShader support into Chrome (http://codereview.chromium.org/8480015/).
Also, with Unreal running on Flash, it's become clear that Alchemy has quietly matured into something serious. I was expecting to see everyone argue endlessly about NaCl's "open standards" issues while watching Alchemy charge ahead to take over without asking for anyone's backing.
I don't think Flex ever really had a suitable target audience - the premise was being able to create cross-platform/cross-browser widget applications, but that was hindered by the fact that the entire app ran on the AVM (with all of the limitations that entailed).
Anyone that wanted to deliver a great user experience (or had performance constraints to consider) would end up writing a native app anyway.
Sounds a lot like people making things up to me...
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?
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.
Hell yes.
Perhaps Adobe's tool will be able to account for browser quirks better than humans can. We can all hope.
Hmm? Why?
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!
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.
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.
If you can avoid manipulating the DOM or use a framework that avoids manipulating the DOM you will get fast applications...
They're essentially pulling funding and engineering talent from Flex Development, and made it clear that they see HTML5 as the future.