It might be interesting to hear why people chose Flex in the first place. There was competition back then as well (Silverlight, Lazlo, and more).
I believe that developer productivity was a major factor. And performance/bandwidth advantages of AMF. To me, FlexJS bets heavily on the developer productivity factor. Especially when building enterprise class applications. Traditional Flex apps could rely on the Flash Player to enforce structure and eliminate at least one security exploit: In SWF, you cannot change a function at runtime. In various talks I given about FlexJS, I say that nobody has ever built a skyscraper out of wood and nails. Instead, steel beams and pre-formed braces and fittings are used to ensure that a very large building has sufficient supporting structure and everything fits exactly together exactly as it should. The Flash runtime provides this sort of thing with its runtime verifier. If you bring in a module and expect it to conform to an interface and it doesn't. Flash will tell you at load time. We could probably add code to try to do runtime verification, but it would run in JS and not in the runtime. That's how Flex on Flash met Berty's criteria of "Enterprise Class" and "Security". It is one reason why I still think it is useful to have SWF equivalents at least with UI mocks so you can test all of your code paths in a stricter, enterprise-class, secure runtime. Then you know when it runs on a less secure runtime (the JS runtime) that you did fit all of your beams together correctly. There may always be other JS frameworks out there that are more popular. I don't even think we need to compete against their UI feature set. I'd still be interested in seeing if we can integrate React's UI widgets into a FlexJS app. I think we can differentiate on the workflow for enterprise apps. You might be able to get "Hello World" up faster on some other JS framework, especially one without a tool chain, but as your app grows in complexity, who will help you finish your app on time by helping you find bugs sooner and integrate code written by different teams. There is a saying that the cost of finding a bug is directly proportional to how long it takes to find it. If you catch it as you write it, it is much cheaper to fix it then, than if it ships and some customer calls support about it. Structured languages, tool chains and even runtime verifiers are all things that Java has and Flex on Flash has to help you find bugs sooner. FlexJS is intended to bring as much of Flex to other runtimes. I am looking forward to seeing more of you try to bring your apps from Flash to JS so we can truly see how much of it we can bring over. My 2 cents, -Alex On 9/19/17, 7:50 AM, "Jeffry Houser" <jef...@dot-com-it.com> wrote: > > In my version of the world, the biggest 'competitors' for the "HTML5 >Framework" space are: > >1) *React *for reasons that Peter mentioned. I think this is the >'biggest Player' in the current job market, but the licensing / patent >issues will probably hurt it. > >2) *Angular*, which is from Google, is built in TypeScript. My >impression is that it's 80% of what React already is. Unfortunately, >the move from AngularJS [a JavaScript framework] to Angular [a >TypeScript] framework was jarring--think like moving from Halo to Spark >components with Flex. I think that is the primary reason why React is >eating Angular's lunch in the job market. > >3) *VueJS*: The new up and comer. I don't know much about it, but I >keep hearing about it more and more. > > Unfortunately, much of Berty's list of great things about FlexJS can >also apply to React and Angular and Vue. > >On 9/14/2017 1:38 PM, Peter Ent wrote: >> I think you also need to include folks who would choose to use React >>over >> TypeScript/Angular and other things. React seems very popular to me and >> offers a similar experience to Flex in that you have class files that >> combine presentation and code (like MXML) or just plain code. Plus it >>is a >> gateway to React/Native. I think from the technology point of view, this >> is a big competitor. >> >> ‹peter >> >> On 9/14/17, 9:38 AM, "Piotr Zarzycki" <piotrzarzyck...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>> Hi All, >>> >>> Erik on dev [1] list came up wit interesting question. I'm posting it >>>also >>> here: >>> >>> >>> With the upcoming fork and renewed focus and most likely some >>>publicity, I >>> want to ask the community to answer this question: >>> >>> Why should a web dev choose FlexJS to write JS applications, and not go >>> with a more mainstream option like e.g. TypeScript/Angular? >>> >>> I think that if we can answer that question in a compelling way, we >>>are in >>> a good place as a project (from a code perspective, at least) and it >>>gives >>> the marketing folks something to work with. >>> >>> >>> [1] >>> >>>https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapache-f >>>le >>> >>>x-development.2333347.n4.nabble.com%2FFLEXJS-Marketing-why-should-a-web- >>>de >>> >>>v-choose-FlexJS-td64292.html&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cecab775e076045860df708d4f >>>b7 >>> >>>5d709%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636409930918412857&sd >>>at >>> a=41u1L20hGG7t2r3g3vnepAvG37RZtAv1a9t2Y7G5w%2FE%3D&reserved=0 >>> >>> Thanks, >>> Piotr > >-- >Jeffry Houser >Technical Entrepreneur >https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jeffry >houser.com&data=02%7C01%7C%7C5faa3e9e72d04fa5d01608d4ff6dd21d%7Cfa7b1b5a7b >34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636414294518144028&sdata=NQ1sKoWOBllW5t%2 >BnjiNxVeReeXsUTBwH3IzU5GLLggs%3D&reserved=0 >203-379-0773 >
