I've done a lot of custom Actionscript and AIR programming over the years and recently I've been getting up to speed on Flex. It is an excellent platform already with a massive amount of functionality in it's libraries. AIR support continues to improve and runs on a lot of devices so I think that it's fair to say that Flex is really capable of doing a whole lot. I also am very familiar with the html side and frankly the two platforms are just different. I'd say Flex is better for creating custom applications and having a lot of extras that come with the platform and tooling. However, it can be difficult to explain the details to non-technical folks and it's often a touchy issue for whatever reason. Apache I think gives people and companies more control over the framework if they need to make changes independently and faster as opposed to waiting on Adobe.
Basically, Flex gives you all of the enterprise good stuff for interacting with the back end, all of the components and skinning, and then all of the underlying platform capabilities with the Actionscript language, stage3D, and native accessibility. Then you can bring in more custom projects, animations, or whatever else via the more traditional Flash tooling or whatever else might output an swf. Then it also supports a lot of the open standards so you can load in a lot of that as well. So often it's more a question of what Flex can't do, and confusion surrounding all of the things that it can do. As someone else mentioned, it seems to be a case where Flex or the platform isn't the problem, rather just getting a clear understanding of what it can do and getting support to actually use it :) I always enjoyed using the Flash platform because it's fun and really nice to use. I'm really happy to see such a great group of folks working on this project and I hope that I'll be able to use Flex and AIR at my company in the future. Thanks, David Hertenstein Lead Developer .idea T. 214.529.0668 E. david.hertenst...@idea.com www.idea.com -----Original Message----- From: Fréderic Cox [mailto:coxfrede...@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 28, 2013 9:56 AM To: users@flex.apache.org Subject: Re: Future of Flex technology At the company I work we have a sales application that runs on Mac + Win + iPad, it could even run on an Android tablet. And it is the same code .. That is what I call flexible. It works great for us and I know it works great for other companies as well. We are also create Mac/Win desktop apps this way for our clients. In that area HTML5 can do nothing, absolutely nothing compared to Flex/AIR. Only for websites I believe HTML is better but than it also comes with cross browser issues. So for productivity Flex/AIR is also much better. And we create our websites in HTML here and our apps in Flex/AIR. Guess who is the least frustrated here, HTML developers or me? It just works here for me :-) My boss asked for a simple HTML application where a tree would grow after playing a video. We created it in HTML, tested in browser and was working fine. Then tested it on iPad and it was REALLY slow (but using Canvas for drawing and using an animated gif). One animated gif worked fine but we needed three separate gifs and that just didn't work smoothly at all. Spend 2-3 days on it. We needed it the next day, so in the evening I created it from scratch in Flex and created an iPad app. My boss again was shown how for cutting edge projects you need Flash/AIR, not HTML at the moment. Fréderic Cox On 28/02/13 16:37, "Russell Warren" <r...@perspexis.com> wrote: >Regarding comments about Flex on mobile, I'll chime in with a variant >on this. I personally don't care much about Flex on "mobile" (ie: >phones), but am definitely interested in Flex on tablets. I separate >the two, although I think most don't due to the often similar hardware and OS. > >Flex is excellent for enterprise (as often stated) and we're heavily >invested in it... and this is as a newcomer to Flex in the last year or >so, which may be of interest to some. > >However, 'enterprise' used to mean 'controlled environments using >desktop PCs', but these days there is a lot of increased tablet use, >especially by execs, in the enterprise space. We haven't crossed that >bridge yet, but don't realistically expect to get much of a code base >ported from the desktop Flex apps over to the tablet space. One can >hope, of course, but I expect that when it comes time for tablet apps >we'll be porting a lot of code. Time will tell, and we'll be certainly >trying out AIR on that day, but performance expectations for tablets >are low based on the few demos we've played with. This only marginally >affects our enthusiasm for Flex on the desktop... rewriting code for >different platforms is the norm these days, but from a >desktop/os/browser portability perspective, Flex/AS3/Flash just can't >be beat. Plus it's awesome (no matter what the unfortunate state of >public opinion/awareness is). > >We're sticking with Flex for a while yet. > >Russ
