Hi, I work for Adobe as a Flex expert, and here's my point of view. Well, actually I think that first Adobe needed to start with a "product" strategy. Flex was the first RIA technology, and it's still the leading RIA technology of the market. Adobe had to innovate, experimenting new features every year and getting the community excited. That's what generates adoption. Now that the Flex SDK is very mature, it can answer almost all Enterprise needs. It's time to let the community and the customers drive the decisions with Adobe about the future of Flex. Flex masters want to actively contribute to the framework for years. Now there is an opportunity to install Flex as a standard Enteprise RIA stack. Adobe is not only proposing Flex to Apache, Adobe is also proposing BlazeDS, Falcon, FalconJS, and will share all the work already done on Flex 5 components. Details are here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex-announcements...
More of a worry is the fact Flex is dependent on the Flash player which as of yet has not been opensourced.
A headless player is holding back CI in a big way.
I also can't see FalconJS delivering a full flex stack without help from the browsers. A lot could be rendered in a canvas, but then you get into situations where you need stage text etc...
I just wish Adobe had a simular JS environment to announce at the same time, or slightly before. At least then there would be a migration path. Currently Flex devs are trying to find a simular enterprise RIA platform, and none of them are owned by Adobe.
Flex has a dependency on the Flash player, but that doesn't have to be the case. As an ASF project, that dependency can (and likely will need to be) broken.
Not to diminish your point, but calling Flex the first RIA technology is a stretch of imagination.
Even if you ignore all the other technologies that were labeled RIA, you simply can't ignore OpenLaszlo which happened before Flex and from which Adobe probably took inspiration:
Yes, OpenLaszlo did come before FLEX, and Macromedia was certainly aware of it when they designed FLEX. The big difference between OpenLaszlo and FLEX is that OpenLaszlo was designed from the start (2000-2001) to be independent of the delivery platform, and FLEX was designed from the start (2003-2004) to lock developers into Flash.
OpenLaszlo was originally designed to be cross platform, first targeting Flash, then eventually other platforms like DHTML, which it now does. But FLEX is impossible to use with anything but Flash, by design.
And now, predictably, people are complaining about being locked into Flash because they used FLEX, while Adobe is abandoning FLEX and Flash.
Thanks very much for posting that link, for some reason I hadn't seen it yet. It very much demonstrates that Adobe are still committed to Flex, which is very good news to me.
"Adobe will also have a team of Flex SDK engineers contributing to those new Apache projects as their full-time responsibility." certainly doesn't read to me that they have abandoned the project.
"Falcon, the next-generation MXML and ActionScript compiler that is currently under development (this will be contributed when complete in 2012)
Falcon JS, an experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript."
That is actually one of the most exciting things I have read in a long time regarding software development. I wasn't aware work on this was under-way, though I had suspected it might be.
I will look back and laugh if in a couple of years all the people hating on Flex now are using these tools to build their HTML 5 applications.
I can actually see these developments improving Flex for the community in the years to come.
Regardless, the general impression is that adobe is abandoning flex. If adobe themselves are re-investing their efforts in html5, why should anybody knowingly want to adopt flex? I'm sure there will always be a reason to use flex in the future but such reports don't do flex any good in the long run, even if the idea is to allow the community to drive it.
Edit: Simply bad timing on adobes part.
