A week later, there are some interesting blog posts, trying to capture what the Flex community thinks of an Apache Flex:
http://www.adamflater.net/2011/12/14/apache-flex-beginning/ http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2011/12/22/update-on-the-apache-flex-incubator-proposal/ http://yakovfain.com/2011/12/15/the-future-of-the-flex-framework-in-enterprise-it/ Yakov Fain has some good points, in my eyes. One of his colleagues will be on of the initial committers for an Apache Flex, and Farata has been working with Flex long enough to know the Flex/enterprise world. Here are his conclusions: 1. Flex remains my first choice framework for developing RIA and AIR for developing desktop and mobile applications. 2. I’m also planning to go deep under the skin of one JavaScript framework, and it’s not jQuery. I like to have more than one tool in my toolbox. 3. Our company, Farata Systems will offer commercial technical support for Flex, AIR and BlazeDS both on the desktops and on tablets. We’ll make an official announcement about it shortly. 4. Our company continues offering training in Flex and Java as we always did, but next spring we’ll add a class “HTML5/JavaScript for Enterprise Developers”. 5. Under such management Adobe won’t last long and will have to be acquired by another company. And in a comment he continues: "One of the main Adobe’s issues with Flex was their inability to monetize this tool. Another good example of this is their absolutely stupid pricing policy for LiveCycle Data Services. Requesting $100K+ for a typical setup of LCDS servers simply killed this technology. During the last 5 years only one of our clients was using LCDS and this was four years ago. Everyone else was happy with free BlazeDS. LiveCycle is yet another super expensive monster. I wish Adobe luck – they still employ a number of great people, but I lost my interest in this company after they turned their back on lots of their loyal customers and partners." Reading "inability to monetize this tool", hey, that's OpenLaszlo. But it's good to see that other companies - like Ferata - are willing to step and provide commercial support for Flex and BlazeDS, which probably will be Apache projects very soon. That could have been a good model for OpenLaszlo. Laszlo's main business has never been OpenLaszlo consulting or offering professional support for the platform. But there never was any partner offering commercial platform support to enterprises. - Raju On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Raju Bitter <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks, Sebastian. Based on what I've read and seen (small demo apps > on video) of Falcon JS, Adobe doesn't believe in the JS > cross-compilation feature. The reason is that the Flex components are > much too heavyweight. I though that the new component set they are > working on for the next release would be more light-weight, but they > probably need to support the old APIs. > > Think of it: an app with a few buttons generated into 5 MB of JS code! > For OpenLaszlo DHTML, that's less than 600k (uncompressed, in both > cases). For OpenLaszlo, Falcon JS might even work with better > performance, since the decision to use Sprites as the base class for > visual objects can be perfectly matched to using views. But in the > presentation video on Falcon JS, the Adobe managers use words like > "experimental", "release by the end of 2012", "not sure if the concept > to cross-compile Flex to JS will work" a lot. > > Adobe has one of the Apache co-founders on-board, since they acquired > Swiss company Day Software: Roy Fielding > http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/ > I can imagine that he's very well connected within the ASF, and that > will definitely help Adobe with an Apache Flex. > > I don't know what the ASF members think, but the idea to have a > compiler as an ASF project which only compiles to Flash bytecode, > that's not what I'd expect from an ASF project - unless there's a > clear dedication to creating alternative runtimes. But I have never > dealt with the ASF, so I don't know. What was your feedback when you > got OpenMeetings into the incubation process, since OpenMeetings uses > Flash and some Adobe protocols? > > - Raju > > On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:16 AM, [email protected] > <[email protected]> wrote: >> Good points on your questions on the incubator list Raju :) >> >> 2011/12/19 [email protected] <[email protected]> >> >>> Its official ^^ Adobe's proposal on the botton ... >>> >>> Maybe interesting to see the Proposal and also the discussion on the >>> Apache List: >>> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/ >>> >>> Sebastian >>> >>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- >>> From: Alex Harui <[email protected]> >>> Date: 2011/12/19 >>> Subject: [PROPOSAL] Flex for Apache Incubator >>> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> >>> >>> >>> Hi everyone, >>> >>> I would like to propose Flex to be an Apache Incubator project. >>> >>> Here's a link to the proposal: >>> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/FlexProposal >>> >>> Thank you, >>> >>> Alex Harui >>> Flex SDK Team >>> Adobe Systems, Inc. >>> http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui >>> >>> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: [email protected] >>> For additional commands, e-mail: [email protected] >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> -- >>> Sebastian Wagner >>> http://www.openmeetings.de >>> http://incubator.apache.org/openmeetings/ >>> http://www.webbase-design.de >>> http://www.wagner-sebastian.com >>> [email protected] >> >> >> >> >> -- >> Sebastian Wagner >> http://www.openmeetings.de >> http://incubator.apache.org/openmeetings/ >> http://www.webbase-design.de >> http://www.wagner-sebastian.com >> [email protected]
