If they'd done this 3 years ago and focused on building kick-ass Flex development environments/authoring tools/etc, Flex would actually have been worth donating at that point. Right now, this feels more like "Here's this cat, I've had it for 10 years and I think it's dying (probably because it was just run over). Take good care of it, thanks."
I'd say it's more like: "HTML is getting closer to what is possible with Flex, so we have to concentrate on that. Flex will thrive as much as the community wants it to. If the community wants it, it will develop it further, if not - why should we?"
Flex isn't THAT bad. It's actually pretty nice when combined with an MVC framework like Mate (SCREW Cairngorm) for developing desktop apps with AIR.
Of course, it takes quite a while to read through the documentation for the INSANE number of classes in Flex (seriously, the list takes up 3 huge posters of 9pt text), but once you have a pretty good grasp of what it can do it's not so bad to work with.
Exactly. I use Flex + Mate on a daily basis building enterprise software and it's a pleasure to work with.
Forget rich UI, I'm talking about being able to build a beautiful, consistent, responsive, and fast web application using 2 developers. The same app in HTML/JS would take a football team of developers and wouldn't even come close.
Yes, there are things that suck about Flex as with everything else in the world, but for what you can achieve with it, there really isn't anything that compares. :)
Agreed, you can build great apps with html and js if you're prepared to spend the time, but it never quite feels like it's the right tool for the job. Flex has more in common with desktop widget toolkits and is a far better fit if your trying to develop anything with that sort of layout.
I'm always surprised these type of frameworks haven't caught on more. I built an admin system using Mozilla XUL a few years back. It's similar to flex in that it provides a cohesive framework with layouts and widgets geared to more traditional apps. It was a breeze to develop compared to the normal battle I have trying to get html and js to do what I want. Unfortunately Mozilla have only really got behind it as a way to develop FireFox plugins and seem to have missed the opportunity to promote it as general way to develop web apps.
I've always wondered how much flex is really tied to flash. Now flex has been thrown to the community I'd like to see someone try to modify it to use html canvas, svg or webgl as it's renderer (instead of flash). The low level rendering primitives would probably map quite closely. The bulk of flex is written in actionscript and mxml which could be compiled to javascript and then run directly in the browser.
Yes -- apache mainly has projects centered around Java and C/C++. Flex seems like a re-do of Java (from the VM to the API). Sure, they won't reject a given horse (or cat), but I don't see that much reason for them to actively maintain this.
Yeah, I feel like someone needs to write a guide to corporations 'successfully open sourcing a project'. Together with some of Oracle's decisions we have recently had a number of bad examples.
On one hand side - yes, the "open sourcing" of some projects was done in a really silly way.
On the other - I'm glad they at least do this when abandoning the project. How many times do we hear "if they discontinue this, they might at least open the source so we can continue porting"? As long as we agree it's pretty much EOLing rather than open-sourcing, we can be glad that we don't get left with binary blobs noone can reuse in any way.
I personally do not believe in Open Sourcing as EOLing is going to help anyone. The donating codebase is often a large piece of code where the original developers have been pulled onto something else and therefore the documentation is too limited for generally anyone else to even compile. And the development community just ends up with one more project that PHBs can point to as 'why open source does not work'.
