Yes, it is troubling, which is why I'm trying as hard as I can to get FlexJS to a point where we can cut alpha then beta quality releases. We've seen third parties downgrade their investment in ActionScript libraries and I predict more, but the whole point of FlexJS is to turn that around, and give these third parties more options.
I would guess from their perspective, they hear way more requests from their JS users, so it is hard to rationalize the cost of parallel development for ActionScript. But if FlexJS gains traction, they will start to hear more requests for ActionScript versions and will hopefully respond to those users. And instead of having to truly do parallel development, FlexJS gives folks a couple of other options: 1) While the stated goal of FlexJS is parity for AS and JS (i.e. you should be able to deploy production versions with Flash and without Flash) the reality is that time will tell if this needs to be true. Maybe the vast majority of FlexJS developers are only going to run the Flash version to sanity check their business logic and only a small minority will need a production version on Flash. Third party library vendors could then produce a less fully -featured ActionScript library. At minimum it could be a bunch of stubs for the JS API and maybe it reserves space in the UI where needed. 2) These third-party library vendors could also re-architect their JS logic to have a clean separation of UI and other code and then write their AS library to use ExternalInterface to call the JS code and have the AS only handle UI. 3) If architected as described in #2, these third-party vendors could make their AS libraries available as open-source so the Apache Flex community could take on the cost/effort of maintaining API parity with the JS library. But right now, I'm not ready to talk to vendors like ESRI or Google Maps about doing this. Well, if I happen to run into them, I give them my elevator speech, but I'm not knocking on their doors. You are welcome to, especially if you are an influential customer. Right now, I'm trying to get FlexJS to an alpha-level so we can get more folks to try it and tell us what needs to be improved so we can get more folks talking about Flex. Then when I do knock on their door, it won't be just me knocking. HTH, -Alex ________________________________________ From: Paul Hastings [[email protected]] Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 11:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: flexJS & 3rd party libs i find this a bit troubling (it's bread & butter for several of our larger clients): http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2014/02/21/esris-roadmap-for-web-developers/ and made me wonder about flexJS & what it would do w/3rd party libs like ESRI's. i don't imagine it would create JS out of those but would the JS it created be developer-friendly enough to edit to use 3rd part JS libs easily? or what's the plan of atatck for this sort of thing? thanks.
