With all the hype of the latest buzzword, HTML5, and its evolving, under development nature (at least in the foreseeable future), leveraging Adobe Flex to front certain types of web applications is still a quite capable technology. With its ability to build complex RIA's (rich internet applications) that can use frameworks, a myriad of powerful ActionScript 3 (AS3) libraries, and the tag-based MXML (and AS3 in-line scripting), and that you can connect your end users to their important data in a multitude of ways - connecting with a server-side infrastructure (via ColdFusion, PHP, .NET are examples) and reading from a database, reading an XML file, reading from a web service, or creating a socket connection - Flex is all that and a bag of chips. Despite what you may have heard or read - Adobe's position on discontinuing Flash Player plugin development work for mobile phones - about the alleged demise of Flash - Flex runs on the web, and the Flash Player plugin for the web is still very much alive.
|
The Flex SDK was already open source before the "Flash Player plugin announcement", and whether Adobe employees or you and I continue to improve the SDK, how is that different from many other open source efforts (e.g. Apache HTTP Server Project)? Did the Apache HTTP Server go away because it's open source? If you're a fan of Flex, we need to demonstrate its capabilities to our clients, continue its evolution, and try to stop fueling the crap shoot of HTML5 as an alleged Flex replacement. HTML5, as it is today, is another bout of browser wars. This browser supports Server Sent Events; this one does not - do we really want to revive the wars again?
Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE9 vs. Firefox |