Fully agree with you all. This decision, and in addition Google refusing to put source code of Maps API is deeply sad. My company has developed a full Flex/AIR standalone application based on GMap, hundreds man.years of developement invested and hundreds of thousands lines of code. It is simply not portable to Javascript as it is AIR application and not Web at all, for several performance and security reasons. In addition we yearly pay x0000$ (I don't gave the exact amount, my message might be trashed.. ?) as Premier customer, just because we also have a small Web application using your maps on our customer's Intranet. And now we learn that you deprecate this API which is a core component of our business.. Moving to another API will cost us a lot.
I personally think that Flash API is a problem for Google, as their classical business model of ads links into web apps cannot be easily handled with this API. Javascript is Web based only... no problem to sell ads on those apps. Google, It would be interesting to know your own estimations of Maps Flash API developers population. At least we can imagine having 2000 because this is this group members count. But in my company we have 4 people that knows very well this API, and they are not subscribed to this group. So it might much more than you expect. And if your decision was based on pages viewed from Flash, I hope you have taken in account that a Flash Application is not necessarily online, but might be used by few B2B users with much more value than a online web user viewing a Javascript GMaps page. Now, just a suggestion, Google, if you get an monthly subscription of 10$ for each developper, this will gives 20000$ a month to keep this API alive. Why didn't you suggest this to this group ? And a charged access much lower than Premier cost could also help you to release a bit some access restrictions to maps, making those investiments profitable as well. More important question : if you intend to support this API for 3 years, how much years do you ensure us that the back-end required to run this Flash API will survive ? Is there a chance that one day you clearly cut the Flash access to your maps ? Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Maps API For Flash" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/google-maps-api-for-flash/-/q45wGmPuPgwJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-maps-api-for-flash?hl=en.
