Christian Cantrell

Hey Christian, I'm curious where you've been seeing the confusion. Within parts of the developer community or within business circles?

This is a great post, and for those of us who stake a bit of our living on Flex, it will be great to point people to.

Ryan,

I've noticed that people I've talked to at conferences and in the course of day to day communication are still thinking of Flex as an enterprise server. It's certainly to be expected. We only announced the next generation of Flex technology last October, so developers haven't had a lot of time to get acclimated. I hoping this post will speed things up a bit.

When should developers expect the Flex 2 family of products to be released. I note that you mentioned that Flex Builder 2.0 is in alpha release.

We are redesigning a large website in mid-2006 and are considering Flex as our front end and ColdFusion as the backend.

Flex2 product lines will be lauched by March 1st (as per the information given to me by an Adobe flex2 product development team member).

Uhh... I dislike gossip... but I have to clarify Gracy's point. I didn't hear it from anyone on the product team but I had "heard" it won't be released till "at least" after March. Which makes sense to me... the beta isn't even out yet and it's Jan 20th? That gives them 5 weeks to go from alpha to beta to production?

I have heard the same release date (March 1st) from a Macromedia team member.

We haven't made any announcements about when the product will release though you can anticipate 1st half of 2006. I don't know about the March 1 date but at best case that would simply be an announcement, I can guarantee you that the product won't be shipping then.

Oh!! Really sad to hear it Matt. 1? for you does this Coldfusion adapter will comes with single flex2 installatiion or as seperate?

Thanks for posting that, Matt. It's not that we're being secretive -- it's just that we're not going to launch any of the Flex 2 products until they are ready, and since Flex Builder 2 is not even in beta yet (although it's probably the most robust alpha product I've ever used), we don't know when that's going to be. As we get closer, I'll provide as much information on my blog as possible.

Hi Christian,

Will Flex 2 Compiler only target Player 8.5, or are there plans to have it target Player 8 or 7?

Thanks,
Mike

Mike,

Only Flash Player 8.5. The Flex Framework 2 is implemented in ActionScript 3, so it will only work in Flash Player 8.5 which is the first Flash Player to have the AS3 virtual machine built in.

Christian,

Thanks for posting this. It helps to clarify things a lot.
One other thing that I'd like to ask is when would you use Flex2 and when would you use Flash 8 on the presentation layer?

Thanks

-Riccardo

Riccardo,

For a couple of versions, we were really trying to morph Flash Authoring into an application development tool, however we eventually realized that we could build a much more powerful RIA IDE if we started with something completely new. The result is Flex Builder 2. Flash Authoring is still better for very customized graphics and animation work while Flex Builder 2 excels at rich internet application development. Make sense?

Hi to everybody:
I think a lot of people (I don't say anybody) are thinking the following things:

1) Flex is and was a mysterious object;
2) Macromedia marketing used too much the word "dramatically"
[try googling!];
3) Flash developers are going crazy: the language API and its syntax has changed DRAMATICALLY (!) too much times, and they have done the same things in quite four or five different ways. Most of all, there's always a Java programmer coming and telling you that here we talk about "OOP features", not a real programming language;
4) Macromedia answer to the point 3 seemed the creation of AS3. Now, it takes TIME to learn AS 2 as it takes time to learn other technologies. Consider this;
5) Why should one buy/learn/use Flash 8 AS if somewhere on the Internet there's a new API waiting for alpha pioneers to try it;
6) where's the need of Labs;
7) Why not to use SVG that's really a standard;
8) Which is the intended target of a thing like Flex;
9) Which are the competitors, the market. Who's the developer you imagine;
10) Finally, it seems always Flash/Flex is used to substitute something else: applets, SVG, HTML, AJAX (Remoting), etc.

Bye

I find another common question that frequently follows an explanation of Flex is:
"Can't you do that with Flash?"/"I can do that already with Flash".
My normal response is along the lines of Flex is better equiped for creating flash applications. However a decent, more educated answer to the "I can already do it in Flash" arguement would be appreciated.

Christian,

thanks for your reply, it makes sense to me. I'm a big fan of Flex (and less of Flash) but the challenge sometimes is that now there is significant overlap between the two technologies (please correct me if I'm wrong) that ultimately it also depends on what our developers are more familiar with.

-Riccardo

Just seconding Riccardo's last question and questions 8 and 9 especially of Brice. It's really hard to pin down what's the difference between the kind of applications you would develop with Flex and those with Flash. Because of it's programming capabilities with AS, the ability to consume Web Services and the like Flash is more than a front-end tool it's the V and the C in MVC. However it's not set up well to do applications that are page view based because of it's orientation around the Timeline. Is Flex meant to fix those problems and if so how? Also why not make a version of the Flash IDE (not flex) that lets you easily organize a project based on pages and not a timeline with frames?

Just a bit more fuel for the "I can already do that with Flash" fire; Flash is DRAMATICALLY less expensive than Flex--like, way!

John, Flash is definitely not less expensive than Flex. The Flex SDK is actually free (or will be, once we release it), and Flex Builder will be priced below $1,000 -- probably very close to how Flash is priced.

The biggest difference between Flash and Flex is that Flash is primarily an animation/design tool while Flex Builder is a hard-core application development IDE with all the features (and more) that you'd expect from a modern IDE. If you use Flash, and you're interested in seeing how Flex Builder is different, go download the beta from labs.adobe.com and have a look. I think you'll agree that they are drastically different tools.