Is Flex/AIR a dying technology?

Here is a good answer from enterprise Flex guru:

http://yakovfain.com/2011/11/09/the-rumors-of-flash-players-death-are-greatly-exaggerated/

I hope that Apple will reconsider it's Flash hatred soon.

IMHO, Adobe gave up too soon and haven't handled PR correctly.

Of course Flex is dying. Anyone who says otherwise is just engaged in wishful thinking.

Look at it this way. Flash Pro is being kept in-house, while Flex is being sent to live with the neighbors. But, "really, we're just as dedicated to Flex as ever." Yeah, right. This fact alone should tell you everything you need to know.

Most of us work for companies, and we know that companies are primarily interested in the bottom line. We also know that Adobe just laid off a boat load of developers and other employees. So, let's say you have a limited number of developers, are you going to spend your resources on:

a) projects that promote your profitable product lines?, OR

b) projects that support an open source community?

Next, consider that the open source Flex community relies on a proprietary runtime. You can only develop new SDK functionally that either:

a) is supported by the existing Flashplayer, or

b) that requires new Flashplayer features and Adobe is willling to expend resources (e.g., developers working on profitable projects).

Bottom line is this. Open source projects that depend on a proprietary product are doomed to fail - especially when the company owning the proprietary product gets nothing out of diverting resource from profitable product development to open source charitable contributions.

Once Adobe has let a couple years go by, and they are well past the current blow back from their Reed Hastings-like decision, their support of open source Flex will be less and less. There is simply no bottom line reason to continue to support Flex. Let's face it. By supporting Flex via their Flashplayer, they increase the likelihood of it being more buggy than necessary. Flex is an albatrose around the neck of Adobe and their Flashplayer.

Take a look here for a rather more expansive and positive explanation of Adobe's plans:

http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html

Flex will die if:

1. mobile (read: tablet) computing continues to replace desktops and laptops AND
2. tablets remain physically limited in terms of memory and speed AND
3. certain hardware manufacturers, who shall remain namless insist on controlling/gatekeeping their devices by limiting software access AND
4. HTML5+JS+CSS can catch up and get even halfway to where flex is in terms of functionality

Flex will not die if

1. tablet computing is here this christmas but gone before next christmas OR
2. tablets become physically capable of running relatively large software stacks like flash player without "missing a beat" OR
3. Android increases its marketshare over iOS and consumers go back to valuing the open-and-accesible over the closed-but-shiny OR
4. New open standards (HTML5) continue to develop at the rater they have over the past decade

I won't pretend to know what is going on, but from my vantage point, the form factor advantage of tablets is here to stay - I see them becoming ubiqutous. As for Item four, I can only scratch my head and conclude that someone at adobe knows a lot more about this than we do, because I don't see an open standard replacement for flex that has even half of its power coming anytime soon. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I think the cost of being in the development business just got WAY more expensive.

The money you might save by using open standard frameworks will be nothing compared to the money you will spend getting the code to work everywhere. I have my doubts that an open standard will ever be implemented consistently enough to rival what we have now with flex and flash player.

I don't think that the sky is falling, but I imagine the cost of staying dry is about to go through the roof.

I don't think Flex is dying perse.  But what most people including me are scared of is the perception of Flex's viability and long term support.  For instance, I have a little pet project I am working on that I am hoping to pitch to some companies, now if I go into a room full of MBA's I risk being turned down because they have heard this and that about Flex.  The driving issue is that it becomes harder to advocate Flex based projects because of the perceived lack of support by Adobe discontinuing the allocation of resources to it.

As far as mobile development goes, that most likely came about in the Flex world because of the perception.  No company wants to get left behind with their technology and having a mobile branch of Flex just made it that much more competitive, at least in the beginning.  With the proliferation of tablets and smartphones, I can't say that was such a bad idea.

From my username you can tell I know my way around FOSS, but I have a bad feeling about Flex going FOSS.  Let's start with Java comparisons. Java is a language that generally has its roots in the backend, firmly in the realm of neckbeards.  It is also the backbone of many corporations' backends and technologies, if not for the language itself, then for the VM (JRuby, Scala, Closure,etc).  This leads to the platform having MASSIVE corporate support from tech giants such as IBM, Redhat and others who can see to it themselves that Java survives.  ( On a sidenote, think of the operations coverage Java has, from DBs, Persistence, Networking, Imaging, Fronted("yuck") and even client side("double yuck") ) .

Now lets look at Flex,  I don't think it has the massive corporate support as Java since it can solve every single problem in the software field so that may hurt it.  More importantly, like someone else pointed out, what about the VM it runs on, or the idea that Flex is opensource, but EventDispatcher is not ? 

I don't think Flex is dead perse, but its market value in terms of people wanting to do projects in it has taken a hit since people are unsure of its fate.  I can tell you this though, I think HTML5 isn't quite there yet ( 6 months - 1 year ), it doesn't seem to lend itself to the same workflow type as Flex/AS3.  The whole JS world and language seems to defy any OO rules at first glance, maybe this is where Adobe is going to come in, I don't know.

ColdFusion has allegedly been a "dying technology" for what, like a decade now?  Way too many people are way too eager to declare things "dead", when they have NO idea what they're talking about.

Why are people so afraid of abandoning the mobile garbage market?  Most of those toy applications don't need an SDK like Flex.  It's about time we stopped wasting resources on Flex mobile, to focus on where it matters.  That market probably should never have been targeted in the first place for Flash/Flex.  If Adobe leadership should be ashamed about anything, it should be getting caught in the "mobile is all that matters" hype and hysteria going around lately.  Flex/FB 4.5 (mobile) was a waste.

I really don't think Flex is going away anytime soon. I have worked with many technologies throughout my career, and the Flex technology stack is the best thing out there right now for deploying rich front-end apps to as many screens as possible.

The main problem I forsee is pushback from the decision makers (clients) because of the bad rep Flash has gotten over the past few days (and longer). When that happens (and it will), my suggestion is that you turn the conversation around so it isn't about "Flash" or "HTML5". Make the conversation about what kind of features you can offer, and what devices you can offer them on. Flex will win hands down in that conversation, because the reality is that HTML5 simply isn't ready to replace it.

That's just one man's opinion at least.

For the mobile world, sure. That is about 7% of the browser market, according to a seminar I heard at Ga Tech a few weeks ago. But as long as people use PC's, Flex/AIR will be supported. There are some enterprise applications out there that are using Flex, entrenched in it, such as SAP and Flex. So the process of phasing out Flex, if it were to be, would be a couple years to come at minimum.

I remember when Flex started getting big 4-5 years ago, and people were saying JavaScript would be dead in 1-2 years. Look where we are now.

Personally I love coding in Flex. But I am ramping up on HTML5 next year.