Flex 2, 1 year later!
DIGG IT!
Published
Friday, June 29, 2007
at
12:09 PM
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Things have really changed for Flex! It is really amazing seeing June 28th go by marking the 1 year anniversary of Flex 2's release. What has really impressed me is the sheer number of public facing sites and companies committing to Flex since June 28. Typically there is a long wait until the Flash Player runtime is widely deployed but somehow with Flex 2 we moved rapidly beyond this trend. I think this was partly due to the sheer size of the Flex 2 release some 4 years in the making. It is really rare to get a new runtime, compiler, language, tooling, components, and servers all shipping concurrently on the same day. It was a great release!Flex has really entered a growth stage as a development framework. If you are writing applications for AIR or Flash Player, it is hard to avoid using Flex given the productivity of development and what you get free in the SDK. The release has changed the consulting marketplace and there is an ever present drought of Flex development talent. This shortage has raised consulting rates and fills my inbox daily with requests for names of developers to recommend for projects.
Flex 3 builds upon what was delivered in Flex 2 adding to the capability without disrupting the value of wide deployment and compatibility. When Flex 3 is released it will be supported in 95% of browsers without installation, that is a big deal. Additionally the changes in the SDK were designed to be non-disruptive from Flex 2 to Flex 3.
More impressive is that Flex has a long future ahead. There are teams hard at work on pushing Flex far beyond todays capabilities, far beyond what Flex 2 and Flex 3 deliver. All I can say to this is that MAX 2007 will be an amazing event. :)
More to Come!
Ted :)