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

[DasaPaddock]

Adobe is no longer releasing new versions of the mobile browser Flash Player plugin.

Adobe is still supporting and working on future Flex SDK releases.

Please see:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex-announcements.html

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/articles/recent-updates.html

http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgisserver/archive/2011/11/17/Some-thoughts-on-the-direction-of-th...

[DerekLaw]

Hi Cesar,

Just to add onto Dasa's post, please review this ArcGIS Server blog post,

Some thoughts on the ArcGIS web mapping APIs (JavaScript, Flex, and Silverlight)

Hope this helps,

[ReneRubalcava]

Dasa chimed in over here
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/43859-Adobe-donating-Flex-to-open-source-community

It's basically going from Adobe Flex to Apache Flex.

[RichardWatson]

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex-announcements.html

Q: What is Adobe's position on HTML5?

In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development.

[Anonymous User]

Please review the following article that would throw more light on Esri�??s stance to the Web API�??s.

http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/arcgisserver/archive/2011/11/17/Some-thoughts-on-the-direction-of-th...

[MikeExon]

There is a nice summary of Flash/Flex, Silverlight and their future here...
http://www.georelated.com/2011/11/web-mapping-enabling-technology-are.html

[PaulHastings1]

that "georelated" article continually uses the term "standard" for HTML5 when its not yet a standard & probably won't be one until 2015. yes, adobe advises HTML5 for enterprise but in the "long term" (5 years) & that's provided major browsers actually comply w/what will be the HTML5 standard (if you've been around long enough, you'd know not to trust browser makers to do anything "right"). and to get everybody on board w/HTML5 capable browsers is going to take a fairly long time, you won't be able to just jump to HTML5, you'll still need to produce apps for older, non-HTML5 browsers (and who's going to pay for that? probably end up using flex in the end anyway).

furthermore the current tooling for JS/HTML5 is pretty awful. until somebody produces an equivalent to flash builder for JS/HTML5, development is going to be slow, painful & expensive. JS itself is painful to develop large/complex apps (i don't know of any).

all adobe has done is dump flash for mobile browsers (which hardly anybody used). and in case you don't know there are a horrifying number of mobile browser versions out in the wild, having to fully support all of them was probably another reason to dump flash on mobile browsers. adobe finally make flex open source (which people have been complaining about for years), which i think is a very positive thing.

adobe has not killed off flash or flex. you've probably got at least 5+ years of flex to go. i wouldn't jump ship just yet.

[RichardWatson]

Isn't GMail a significant JS application?

BTW, I largely agree with everything you said.  I think that JS/HTML5/CSS represents what I refer to as the devolution of programming, i.e. moving to lower levels of abstraction where programming is more difficult and it is harder to be productive.

I personally love C/C++ and can debug assembly language so the issue is not that I can't move lower in the stack.  The issue is that I prefer not to move lower unless there is a compelling reason to do so.

[PaulHastings1]

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.