Hey all: If you are a Flex devotee, like me, a longtime admirer of the beauty in Flex that introduced a declarative + procedural model that preceded Microsoft's C sharp and WPF models that essentially stole the idea from Flex for a structural MVC where the view and controller were represented by the MXML and as3 respectively, I believe there is much life left in Flex.
It is still a very relevant platform for creating single-codebase mobile apps for Android and iOS. It produces far smaller executables than Swift and most all other competing platforms. The availability of ANEs to access native capability provides near parity with native app development, not quite, but close enough to get multiplatform support for a single platform. I've been developing Flex apps since 2007 with the release of Flex 3 by Adobe. I was working for Intuit at the time Flex was a huge departure from Intuit's C++/MFC centric development platform that was used for QuickBooks (I was a QuickBooks engineer prior to accepting a challenge to develop a new product using Flex). It was refreshing to start a new project and not have to maintain and develop on a 6 million LOC C++ application. While I was at it I was also one of a team that was evaluating MS WPF so I learned that too, and while I still think WPF was amazing, it stole much of it's design from Macromedia that designed Flex, and I haven't seen a new paradigm to challenge the declarative/procedural design even today, IMHO. But the real power is in the runtime. Just like Java practically replaced C and C++ based web development because of the amazing advantages of a sandboxed runtime environment, the AIR runtime is brilliant, even today. No other major platform for mobile (or web, though the flash player is definitely dying) can equal the performance of the AIR runtime. One must compile to native and that comes with a boatload of problems especially multi-platform support. A runtime engine is still brilliant, just as Java runtimes still power nearly half of the billions of web apps on the internet. What I don't understand is why Flex doesn't attract more developers, but I'm sure it's because universities and colleges, and tech schools don't teach it because it's considered fringe. If people really understood what it could do we could see third party tools, ANEs, and new innovations that pushed it back into the mainstream. Oh well. Sometimes the best ideas and designs don't achieve mindshare and fail for reasons entirely unrelated to capability. Ancients like me will remember the VHS vs. Betacam wars where the latter was 10X better and still failed because of marketing, mindshare, and somewhat political reasoning. My company still has two very successful mobile apps built with Flex/AIR and some ANEs by Distriqt (the very best ANE developer on the planet without doubt): Linqto and Keiretsu Forum. Alas, we have even succumbed to pressure to replace these apps with REACT Native and will be embarking on this road in the next month. It's a sad day. But now that a big company like Adobe has relinquished the reins of both Flex (some years ago) and AIR (to Harmann recently), it seems the fate of this amazing development platform is destined to the graveyard. I know there's lots of great innovation with Royale to breathe live back into Flex apps, and there are migration options as well. These are great things, but in my opinion, unnecessary because the AIR runtime is FAR, FAR better than relying on any browser-based rendering engine to render javascript, html, and CSS. Just sharing my opinion as someone who has made his living with Flex since 2007, was once a master/guru of MFC/C++ since Windows 1.5, and got my first contract in 1983. Erik Thomas Chief Architect http://linqto.com
