Hi, Thanks for the time to reply and sorry if you feel you post was taken out of context. You're certainly welcome to express your views on this list and elsewhere.
> - It's not the problem of Apache or any other community. I still stand by > "meritocracy" doesn't work. Just because other models exist doesn't mean that meritocracy doesn't work. I think there are many successful project at Apache (and elsewhere) that show otherwise. This doesn't mean that it's easy however. There are issues with managed by one person model. For instance what happens when that person (in time) move on to something else? Or when there a disagreement in direction. Who pays for or encourages developers to give time/implementing the vision? How do you build a community around this? All of these have been issues with some of the Flex frameworks that had this model. Without significant funding and resources I couldn't that model working with Flex long term and it's not the Apache way. Of course anyone is welcome to take the Flex project, fork it and run with it how they want. > What's more, it's an idea and a global platform people invested a lot in. > This sort of responsibility cannot be handled by "community". Community tends > to come and go, flow by. The people that invested a lot in Flex are part of the community, it up to them how they want to contribute or not. > - The way Apache's doing things feels very archaic to me sometimes. Mailing > lists? Really? Mailing lists are needed so that a) everything is in the open and b) given that people live in different timezone around the world a way to easily respond. I assume you prefer a web forum style? I find web forums slow, buggy, slow and hard to search on, hard to use on mobile devices and assume you're always have a connection. Each to their own. But there's no reason why we can't have both this has been raised before and doesn't look too hard to set up. See https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLEX-33536 Anyone up to help out here? > Then we have links to apache and markmail. Case study - Markmail for users > mailing lists doesn't work. Also been raised before. Anyone? https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLEX-33538 > - improve on skinning/styling approach. It's a known fact, that Flex 4 is > generally slower than Flex 3. That's no good. Generally slower yes but some people feel it has other advantages. The right question to ask is it fast enough for what I need done? In most cases the answer is yes. All frameworks are tradeoff between convenience, functionally, time saving on one hand and performance on the other. There's also the question given that spark was build around Adobe tooling that is no longer being developed further, is spark actually a good direction to go in? Quick often when doing simple things I find spark and skinning gets in the way, when the older CSS styling in mx does the job simply and effectively. > - get rid of mx totally and fill in missing spark parts That is being done, there's a fair number of new spark components in the new experimental namespace. Like everything this takes time and effort. But I don't see we can get rid of mx entirely, there still a lot of flex out here that uses mx and I don;t think it what users of the SDK would want. He still get JIRA issues raised against Flex 3 :-) > - clean and easy to access 3rd party component market / shareplace That's possibly a good business opportunity for someone, but Adobe tried this many times (anyone remember central?) and never managed to really get it off the ground. > - figure out the global chokepoints and improve on speed There still places where I feel speed can be improved and we have better tools (advanced telemetry) to make the job easier. There are not going to be order of magnitude speed improvements but will be significant, there already been some significant speed improvements with CSS styling and the ADG. > Flex 4 performance is currently a laughing stock. I have to disagree on that point, and its certainly not been my experience. > - arm Flex beautifully for mobile. What do you need needs to be one here? Thanks for the ideas on where you see Flex needs to be improved - feedback is always useful. Thanks, Justin
