Flex or HTML5??

[CesarNaranjo]

Adobe announce not more develop for FLEX.
Then what is the future of marriage arcgis-flex?

It is good idea to continue developing in flex o rnot more?

Money, time, work many things for many things to think about

[RoyceSimpson]

i would call gmail significant but not particularly complex. and anyway, geez, that's google. who else has google's engineering resources?

the trend for years, at least server side, has been towards more dev productivity (eg, coldfusion), not less. i don't get the rush backwards.


one, i think important, point i forgot to mention is the apple/canvas tag HTML5 boogeyman. flex will soon be opensource (except for the tooling & player--which i think adobe simply can't OS because they license stuff in the player). we could soon be faced with a different proprietary overlord, but instead of a fairly open adobe we get apple, who's ideas of technology seem to be more penal colony than their "1984" commercial suggested way back when.

I've been trying to immerse myself in a logical, well rationed understanding of all of this and am 100% in line with your analysis and won't add anything to it. 

Too bad the news Adobe is dribbling out re Flex/Flash is not being done in a crystal clear fashion and is serving to needlessly spook a lot of impatient, easily spooked folks.

[PaulHastings1]

i think this site helps sum up the current situation nicely: http://ishtml5readyyet.com/

[KirkMower]

HTML 5 is a presentation layer. So if all you want to do is tween an animation across a screen, or make some fold-out menus, then go for it. HTML 5 is not an application development platform. Flex is an application development platform. Flash started out where HTML 5 is now in 1997 when Macromedia purchased the then start-up 'FutureSplash'.

FutureSplash was amazing in that it streamed content to the browser plug-in, greatly reducing download speeds. This allowed for animations far beyond the animated GIFs of the day. HTML 5, on the other hand, relies on heavy duty broadband connections of today - that is everything has to be loaded before _anything_ can happen. Flex has evolved out of the long and rich history of Flash - and a lot of smart ColdFusion people (like Paul). It can still stream data into the app - just try and load some WFS data via HTML 5 ... oh, and then take that GML and actually _draw_ something meaningful. That's one big reinvention of the wheel. Flex and its Flash underpinnings can draw just about anything right now - add in the ready made graphing libraries, the widgets to load tiles...oh and the 'stage' in Flex has always had a layered concept - no need for all that flunking around with Z levels, etc...

Mobile Flex development = AIR. AIR is the wrapper for Flex apps that will allow a flex app to be deployed anywhere - iOS, Android, Desktop, Mac, and so on. And right now, the Flash player in the browser displays exactly the same content across _all_ browsers - Mozilla, IE and its variants, Chrome, Opera, Dolphin (even on Android)...and right now, none of these browsers support the standard for JavaScript in the same way, let alone HTML 5.

So the proto-Marxist dream of everybody getting together and working to standards for the common good, well, is a great idea in theory (like Marxism itself), but the commercial model always tends towards Microsoft's own approach to standards: 'Embrace, extend, extinguish'. Sad but true, and Flex has managed to cut through all of that type of BS over a long history with Flash and delivers a solid and robust app development platform for the web and mobile right now. No 'ifs', 'and's or 'buts'...