Hey Carlos:
Our decision to commit to React Native was because:
1.) It is very difficult to find skilled (or even interested in learning) Flex
developers anymore. I posted a job on this very forum six weeks ago and
received no interest from anyone wanting to go full-time as a Flex/AIR remote
developer, and our other recruiting channel also came up empty.
2.) Schools are teaching React, and there are many young, passionate developers
who want to work with it.
3.) The right business decision for us was to identify and embrace a platform
that's proven, yet young enough to still be growing in adoption, and shares
language, tools, libraries, design patterns etc., between web front-end (React)
and mobile (React Native), and supports implementing native access to devices
without relying solely on a plug-in marketplace.
I'm not really interested in learning and developing with React myself, but
I've been coding less and less as our company has started growing pretty fast
now since we released an MVP in February that has gone pretty viral among
investors who want to invest in pre-IPO companies, like Robinhood, Ripple, and
more.
If I were to start another company with a great app idea by myself, I will
certainly use Flex/AIR for mobile, and almost certainly use Royale for web and
continue with a Java/Spring back-end with MySQL all running in AWS cloud. That
is my comfort zone tech-stack I've been working in for many years.
Thanks for making me think about Royale for my next web project and I wish you
the best of luck evangelizing and recruiting a strong team to push this tech
back into the mainstream.
Best regards,
Erik
=====
Hi Erik,
As I said, I understand your company wants to go React. It's just natural.
I'd love to see more companies trusting Royale and going with us, but while
that is attractive don't think that should be our final purpose. I must say
I'm glad to work on improving Royale since I believe in this technology and
its programming model, I think there's nothing better than it and enjoy it!
:). So getting others (individuals and companies) to jump and use it, would
be very cool, but don't want that to make any difference, but the potential
people that could invest his time in submitting PRs, patches or work in new
outputs like WASM/IOS/Android.
I think Royale should be fun and make people work with it for his personal
apps or try to introduce in its business or company, but knowing there's a
team of passionate people behind it that love to invest his time on making
it better and better over time, and that nowadays is already working, and
maybe we still could miss some things, but now anyone can learn Royale and
make anything he still miss on the current state.
Techs, frameworks,...all come and go all the time :), so I feel comfortable
pushing something that is not behind the commercial business tentacles of
Google (Angular), Facebook (React), Microsoft or Apple...
So just say you, don't worry about your company going React, if you love
the Flex (now Royale) programming model and have some personal Flex Apps
you want to migrate, try to go yourself with Royale and enjoy it, I'm sure
you will! :)
Best,
Carlos
