Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by).
Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally.
The Flex concept of variables being "observable" was about 8 years ahead of Backbone and later Angular, and now React-style UI updates from an event loop.
It was surreal working in the Cairngorm Flex framework briefly in 2000s and then see Backbone and Angular pitched as groundbreaking years later. Only now are we getting to a similar level of elegance with loop-style UI updates.
Still haven't had a better development experience than Flex with the CLI compiler.
Built some of the first web based AR engines with it and alchemy. Built giant, 80"+ touchscreen, trade show interactives with it that nobody had a clue were Flash unless you told them. Was able to port just about anything to iPad with Air for Mobile and actually build IPA files on Linux.
All they needed to do was cross compile to HTML5 and barely anyone would be using Angular or Bootstrap nowadays.
> Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by).
Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an active developer community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and appear to work on Flex full-time.
Unfortunately, it seems the developer community is focusing most of their efforts on FlexJS, an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I don't see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework space.
If this had been Adobe's focus rather than chucking it at Apache then Adobe would be world leaders in JavaScript app development and we'd all be using their tools.
Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife them all in the back and abandon Flex totally.
Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.