Scott, This is all FUD. You contributed a lot to the Flex community for years, but the below is just so off-base. a) Flex 1.0 and 1.X did not "crash and burn". It was one of the most successfull new product introductions in the history of the company. It was a 1.X product, and it wasn't perfect, and in particular in advance of the new VM the performance was not where any of us wanted it yet at that time. That said, it still was a massive advance, did very well, and many people (not everyone) were very successfull with it. As soon as we had the performance issues nailed with the new VM, we broadened the strategy with the free FlexSDK and FlexBuilder 2. That was (IMO) the right order of operations. You mileage may vary, but Flex is taking off beautifully. b) Our strategy is clear. The FlexSDK is free and can work with any backend you choose--directly via XML, JSON, WebServices, or one of many implementations of AMF. c) We are building an enterprise server product line as well. It isn't intended for everyone. But it has tremendous value for use cases where it it relevent and it is also very successfull. It is clear you are not interested in it yourself, which is fine. Others are. We--Adobe--will continue to do our best to build great products and if we do people will use them. If that is a "conspiracy" I don't get it. d) Many applications have documents/forms as inputs, outputs, artifacts. Being able to integrate in a deep way with documents, using PDF (an ISO standard) can be very valuable. Some of the use cases I have seen lately include health and benefits enrollment, tax submissions, mortgage loan origination, insurance claims processing, corrospondence management, field service management, new account opening, clinical trial management, new drug submissions, grant applications, etc etc. I could go on, but the combination of Flex and LiveCycle (and PDF) enables some very powerfull and seamless applications that create better experiences, reduce costs, improve compliance, etc. I am not sure what is controversial here for you--these apps exist whether they are of interest to you or not. If you aren't interested, so be it. There is no tight coupling with Flex which is free. There is not now nor has there ever been a conspiracy. Whether many people or a few people are interested in LiveCycle is not really an metric that matters to the success of Flex and I am not sure what you are trying to prove. I trust one day you will come back to the fold -;) We'll keep working on advancing Flex and Flash Player and Apollo in the meantime--no conspiracies. -David
________________________________ From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Scott Barnes Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2007 6:44 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Re: Will Microsoft's new Silverlight Player Kill our beloved Flex ? Paul: How many? Seriously, throw the numbers on the table because I got to tell you, both pre-Microsoft and post-Microsoft things haven't changed that radically that DMS is more favoured then SAAS. SAAS is the new SOA dream, and people want it because it's less red-tape to fight for a capital expense claim against not only software but now hardware + bodies to support the software that was bought. SAAS delegates that problem to someone else to solve and so it means in theory less bodies to support the infrastructure and more focus on supporting the users if need be. Not saying DMS is dead by any stretch, i'm sure LiveCycle solves a million and one points of interest in this space and it does look compelling when you separate it away from FLEX for a bit. Yet, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture, how does FLEX developers world-wide get any wins from having LiveCycle in the room, and what percentage of them are in favour of LiveCycle development being slotted in front of FLEX? 2002 Paul, I've been waiting since 2002.. I waded through swapping and changing of Flash Framework directions (V1 to V2) like the rest of some of us on this list. I waited for Royale to hit the street only to watch it crash and burn due to price tag issues (which we all said loud and clear this bites! - listen to the customers is a tip). I watched CENTRAL get thrown our way, and was glad we could use this concept and wondered why it went away (EULA and again not consulting customers first was the perception). I watched as FLEX 2.0 came back, but free only the whole remoting piece dropped off the radar and came back as Flex Data Services. Only Its hard to find someone whom will host this product (why?) and secondly it doesn't support .NET and Java anymore? it's only Java? (It's not as if Remoting + .NET has been a mystery, it was there in the past and if the WebORB folks for example can make it happen? surely Adobe could). It's 2007 and I'm seeing Apollo have "PDF" Integration (which raises an eyebrow on whom this is really for - could be conspiracy theory going off signal, happy to eat crow if i'm wrong on this one as i'm not absolutely sure). Flex Data Services now has a new name, LiveCycle Data Services and FLEX 3 well.. i won't bother... I don't know all the answers but at the very least, I'm seeing all the warning signs of the past and for once, i'd like to raise this (once bit -ok, twice bit -fair enough, thrice bit no thanks). 2002 - 2007, we should be knee deep in RIA happiness and I should be still on the street making bundles of $$ and not working for Microsoft. Fact of the matter is I'm working for them, because to be openly honest i'm going to start over my RIA quest and see what these guys do with Silverlight and WPF as I've done my tour of duty with FLEX and have lots of scars to prove it (It wasn't all bad, I did make a nice living and once I broke through the learning barrier and was able to memorize the entire framework it was easy just lots of fingers on keyboard stuff). On 4/23/07, Paul DeCoursey <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: --- In flexcoders@yahoogroups.com <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> , "Scott Barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Paul, > > How many enterprise / companies do you know are shopping around for > electronic forms built in PDF vs SAAS solutions? Quite a few actually. The company I work for provides this as a service for many fortune 500 companies. Some of those companies are right now in the process of moving to Flex for the front end of their forms systems. PDF has already deeply penetrated the business world. Why do you feel PDF is a danger to business? It has many benefits including being a universal format that is easy to read. It includes versioning and security features required by SOX compliance. It just makes sense for many organizations to adopt. Paul -- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.mossyblog.com <http://www.mossyblog.com>
