Hi guys, I believe you are missing the macro perspective here.
Don't give Flex that much importance in the long term. After all it is just a browser built into Flash, with a set of tools to allow an enterprise development workflow. It won't be long till an opensource alternative pops up... it's just a matter of time till the osflash community develops the pieces and someone puts them together. No rocket science. Moreover, anyone with enough money to get Flex is, most of the times, developing for an intranet where there is full control over the client runtime and they would happily switch to a less expensive alternative, or to one that fits nicer into the workflow, even if they have to give up some eye candy or functionality. Eventually Avalon and other techs will be better practical alternatives for an important majority. The important piece here is the Flash player and it's impressive features, all bundled into one tiny download: - ubiquity ( 9_% ) - consistency across platforms ( including mobile ) - rich scripting language ( AS2 + E4X = reuse, best practices, productivity++ ) - multimedia - streaming, web presence ( flash comm ) I believe it is the sum of these that will be hard to beat... this is MM's strong card. Don't take me wrong, I believe Flex is a wonderful tech, and I enjoy developing with it and having my customers praise me for free... a paradigm shifter. But let's not loose objectivity. It's like talking about Swing, when the important piece is the JVM. So, Flex is happening today... helping Flash gain some respect in the enterprise arena ( and MM make tons of money ), but old good Flash will eventually live on, on it's own, and will evolve as requirements grow. Unless MM pulls some licence trickery that changes the landscape in the short term, of course. Who knows. OTOH, I believe MM has done marvels with in making Flex hard to beat, and I hope some more power come out of merging flex with the rest of the family. Perhaps an integrated presentation ( flex ) + presence + BMP + ESB + collab + management...? The flash player can get that far, no doubt about it. BTW, I was attending a Best of SAP world tour conference the other day, going over some new netweaver features, and I thought... What if these guys had built all the presentation capabilities of netweaver with flash from the beginning! They would have the ultimate platform from head to toes, from desktop to mobile, with very little tradeoffs. The important thing to understand here is that the SOA trend is quickly pushing more and more functonality to layers that are strongly related to presentation: collab, presence, information pushing, drag and relate, high level BUS entry points, etc. Thus a robust solution on this end would enhance any platform dramatically ( this wasn't true some time ago ). Online presence, streaming and collab are just too real and too powerful to overlook nowadays. The same goes for Bea, oracle, etc. Team up, Macromedia! well, that was a getting too OT. Back to work. Best, Aldo On 8/1/05, Darron J. Schall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Rick Bullotta wrote: > > >I also wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Flex client based on the Java > >plug-in someday. When looking at the Flex class models, it has a lot of > >similarities to Java rich client stuff - so who knows - maybe the Flash > >viewer someday becomes classes deployed on a JVM! > > > > > I'd actually be *very* surprised to see this. There was a Flash Player > written in Java a long time ago that supported swf version 2. It was > horrendously slow, and therefore abandoned. Granted Java has made some > performance improvements since then, but how does moving from the Flash > Player to the JVM help at all? > > Flash is already available on a ton of devices, and Java's "write once > run anywhere" mantra didn't pan out as much as Sun wanted it to > especially in the mobile space. Flash is more portable in it's current > codebase then it would be as a Java application, and it also runs faster > as native code anyway. I don't see any reason why MM would want to > invest the time in a Flash Player that runs on top of the JVM since it > doesn't buy them performance or portability, but rather just a new > series of headaches. > > -d > > > > > > -- > Flexcoders Mailing List > FAQ: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/files/flexcodersFAQ.txt > Search Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com > Yahoo! Groups Links > > > > > > > -- ::::: Aldo Bucchi ::::: mobile (56) 8 429 8300 ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12h93mp7o/M=362131.6882499.7825260.1510227/D=groups/S=1705007207:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1122933589/A=2889191/R=0/SIG=10r90krvo/*http://www.thebeehive.org ">Get Bzzzy! 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