Saturday, January 19, 2013

Flex is Dead ?

Few days back I was delivering one presentation on Flex to few of the new comers, then suddenly one of the guys asked me one question:
'What is the advantage of learning a technology that is already dead?'

I was shocked by that question. I don't know why people think Flex is dead. May be announcement of Adobe to donate Flex to Apache, may be over hype of HTML5 replacing Flex (well I am doubtful about it in near future at least), may be other reasons. But whatever be the reasons, I thought about writing one small post about it. I did some googling for dead technologies and found the following:
“.NET is dead” is the big winner with 576000 search results on Google. Congratulations J

“JAVA is dead” is following with 138.000 results. I can hardly feel this!!
“PHP is dead” is a little child with only 35.600 results.
“Ruby is dead” is in the same range with 30.700 results.
“AJAX is dead” generates 6500 results.



So what do we say? Adobe donated Flex to Apache and HTML5 may seem promising, but that does not mean Flex is dead. My opinion is that the decision to donate Flex was really a good one. As it is open source now and Apache has lots of good developers working on Flex SDK, it may result in brighter future for it. The bugs may be fixed quickly now. Well the future will unfold the real picture. I believe that the following links will provide proper direction:
http://www.riagora.com/2011/11/flex-is-open/
http://blogs.adobe.com/flex/2011/11/your-questions-about-flex.html
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/
http://www.universalmind.com/mindshare/entry/html5-for-the-enterprise
http://masuland.wordpress.com/2011/11/28/where-could-flash-coding-be-in-the-year-2050/

Let me know your thoughts on it.