Hi all, During my recent survey on many Chinese AS3 / Flex developers, here is the top 5 highest demands on Flex:
1. Flash Builder Design View support for Flex: Although flex pros don't really need the Design View, a lot of new comers to Flex, the first thing they care about is the Design View. Adobe dropped Design View since Flash Builder 4.7, clearly it's a bad idea, but in the meantime it presents an opportunity: thrid-party IDE like InteliJ IDEA, they can work on design view on their own, I believe people will buy. 2. Flex Spark iOS 7 skin theme: If Apache can design a full set of iOS 7 skins for the existing Flex Spark components, and make it the default skin theme for all the new Flex projects, it will draw a lot of developers, especially the mobile developers. 3. The more demos of the Flex Mobile Apps the better: We all know Flex can do desktop and web apps, cuz it was very popular, but now it's the time of mobile platform, the demand for building cross platform mobile apps is sky high, the official Apache Flex Showcase should highlight the flex mobile app demos, and welcome more of them to come. 4. Multi-Language Flex tutorials and language references support: Since Apache took over Flex, the main language of Flex docs is English, it's a barrier for the foreign developers who doesn't understand English to learn the basic of Flex to get started. 5. The roadmap of the Flex and FlexJS: From Flex 4.8.0 to 4.12.0, it's been quite a ride, Flex is pushing forward and getting better and better, yet we still lack of a clear plan for the future. As a 8 years Flex Developer of myself, for Flex 5.0, I think we need to get rid of the mx stuff completely, and continue to improve the existing Spark components, and introduce more new Spark components especially for the mobile platform. And for the FlexJS, I heard it's a new architecture that's different from the Spark architecture, well, I think that's acceptable, but the lack of Multi-Language tutorials, docs and roadmap, it's more difficult to attract new comers to learn and play with it, so it might be hard to make FlexJS popular, but FlexJS is still worth a shot to target itself to web apps, and leave the native apps to Flex. I know FlexJS can do native apps using wrappers, but given the young age of FlexJS, it's more suitable for simple lite web apps. That's all based on my survey, I hope it would help somehow. Right now all I can do is to bring some suggestions to talk, write some tutorials (in Chinese) to share, and spread the good news of Flex to all the developers that I know. I wish to help more when I got the time and the energy in the future. Best wishes to anyone who read it : ) DarkStone 2014-03-13
