I’ve been waiting for quite a while to write up an informal article on this, and with the official announcement coming from Adobe on Friday, the time has finally come. What I am referring to is the recent announcement that Flex Builder has officially been re-branded to Flash Builder.
Naturally, this announcement has caused quite a stir already in the community. More specifically, the announcement has been met with mixed emotions. I had a feeling that would be the case, considering the fact that when I was first told this, the first words out of my mouth were “As if we didn’t have a hard enough time distinguishing the difference between Flash Designers and Flex Developers already!” I can’t help but laugh as I recall the stark contrast between those first words and what I was saying merely 20 minutes later.
Long Live Flex in the Enterprise!
As a strong advocate for Flex in the Enterprise, one of my longest standing arguments has been for the legitimacy of Flex for large-scale “RIA” applications. The reason I have argued so adamantly in this regard is a result of constant conversations with corporate executives who refer to Flex and AIR as “unproven technology”. Flex gained this stigma amongst a large number of businesses as a result of having watched a substantial number of large-scale RIA Flex projects either never make it to full release or make it to release with only 30% of the intended functionality. On top of that, a significant portion of these projects went way over budget and rarely met deadlines. I’ve spent a lot of time discussing this with people, particularly business decision makers, and I consistently suggest that they not point the finger at Flex, but rather consider the micro-architecture being used, and the people they have making the technical decisions. Personally, I believe that it is largely a result of Adobe Consulting’s attachment to the Cairngorm Framework, which is unsatisfactory for enterprise development, and I’m not the first person to suggest that (I know, how dare I!).
Nonetheless, once you get over the shock of the change in naming convention, it is easy to see that this is actually a very smart move by Adobe. Furthermore, for people like me who are constantly advocating and trying to promote the use of Flex in the enterprise, this re-branding is more of a God-send than anything.
Consider This…
First of all, the movement to the Flash Builder brand marks the separation between the Flex Framework and the IDE built on Eclipse that can be used for the development of ActionScript as well as Flex projects. A general confusion existed in this regard previously, which was blatantly obvious every time I had a Flash Designer that used the Eclipse IDE to build ActionScript classes put down “Flex Developer” on their resume.
True Flex gurus know that there is a pretty hard core learning curve if you really want to get down and dirty with Flex. That is to be expected with anything though. You don’t just gain “guru” status overnight. I don’t want to scare anyone that’s been thinking about giving Flex a try here, so understand that my point is only that the distinction between using Flex Builder and being a true Flex Developer had to be made somehow, so this is a good thing for those of us that have dedicated our lives to Flex for the last four years.
Of course, this brings us to the argument of whether or not the rebranding of Flex Builder to Flash Builder is a trade-off in favor of the aforementioned distinction, for a lack thereof between Flash and Flex development now. In this regard, my suggestion is to consider the fact that a SWF or AIR file can be compiled from Flash Builder (there, I finally called it Flash Builder, happy now? :) ) without a single reference to the Flex framework and without coding a single MXML file.
With that in mind, if you are still questioning the naming convention, then I ask you – is it really Flex Builder if I write all my applications without ever tapping into the Flex framework, and instead opt to code all of my ActionScript classes from scratch instead? How am I using Flex then? Even moreso, how could I call myself a Flex Developer…especially if my first choice was using the Flash CS4 IDE? Yet, this is exactly what I saw on a day-to-day basis for two years, so I see this as a welcome change.
Separation Anxiety
Furthermore, the separation of Flash Builder and the Flex SDK provides a new opportunity to push Flex back into the enterprise and no longer accept the “unproven technology” argument. Business decision-makers need to pay more attention to who they have making the technical decisions and less attention to the technology itself. To expand further on this point, the technical decision makers need to accept responsibility for employing simple and scalable architectural conventions and use logical reasoning to evaluate architectural design patterns and frameworks that are proposed to them, as well as enforce a malleable network infrastructure upon which large-scale RIA applications can be deployed.
Lee Brimelow makes a good point in his response to the community chatter, where he states that we as a community must educate the general population on the fact that Flash is not what it used to be – intros without a “skip” option and animation that truly was completely pointless. Unfortunately, that is still the way a vast majority of the web population thinks when they hear the words “Adobe Flash”.
In contrast to this popular (and clearly outdated) belief, the technology has rapidly evolved into what we now know as (drumroll) The Flash Platform. This encompasses a multitude of Adobe products: ActionScript 3, Flash Professional, Flash Lite for mobile development, Adobe AIR, the Flex framework, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst (soon to come).
So What’s the Issue?
There is one particular argument that I’ve read, which seems to be a pretty valid one: whether or not “Flash Builder” unintentionally suggests that it is a scaled-down version of “Flash Professional”, when in fact they are two different products. Of course, going back to my last point, if we properly educate the general population on what exactly The Flash Platform is and what it means, then this should ultimately be a non-issue. The real issue is whether or not we as leaders in the Flash Platform community can properly educate clients, businesses, students, and individuals on what being a Flash Platform Developer means – its not about being tied to one development tool or a particular SDK. It’s about leading the way as an advocate for the evolution of technology and a rich, user-centric Internet through the Flash Platform as a whole.
With that said, Happy Flash Building!
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Posted by Dan Orlando on May 18th, 2009 :: Filed under
Flash Platform NewsTags ::
Adobe Flash Platform,
Enterprise RIA,
flex news,
RIA News
