Thank You and Goodbye!

Seemed a rather appropriate title for this weekend!

Well, after over 10 years of 24/7 Flex (aka ActionScript) development the time has come to move on.

'Where are you going? Back, back to the future!' or should it be 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose'?

Around 2000 I became involved with ActionScript, a year or two of working on WebTop's and WebOS's and I was frustrated, I knew what I wanted to do but couldn't achieve it, reality was the technology wasn't there.

Then I saw some ActionScript components, then the FireFly components, remoting, MX5 and well, the rest is just history as they say.

Since then ActionScript is all I have done, 24/7, 365 days a year, no Java, no PHP, no ASP, just AS and nothing else, I specialize and leave the rest to other's, it works.

Flash/Flex/ActionScript has been the only practical way to create RIA's for much of the last decade, it was the only technology capable of building serious corporate web apps.

But "all things must pass" and today is the start of a new direction for me, after defending Flex from unjustified attacks over the years, I have slowly come to the realization that there are some serious problems with Flex and more importantly I have found I no longer have the confidence that Adobe will resolve those problems.

Steve Job's now famous rant was over the top and no I don't believe anyone at Adobe is lazy but I can empathize with the frustration behind the comments, they can be damn frustrating to deal with, they do have a tendency to never go back and fix broken things and time and again you find the only way to get any movement from them is to rant.

I could go on for days but:

1) Flash's (lack of) memory management is crippling for large enterprise RIA's.
2) There are places Flash is no longer welcome, namely on any Apple device and devices ARE the future.
3) Nothing in an RIA today actually REQUIRES Flash.

Of course the alternative is JS, CSS3 and HTML5 aka Ajax.

That's not to suggest all is perfect on the 'dark side', it's more like the DeLorean has transported me back to the stone age, well at least back to 2004!

Where are the tools?

Oh please, don't tell me you just went 'wow' over that feature, AS had that 5 years ago!

You aren't seriously expecting I will write code like that?

What do you mean 'what's a syntax checker', and please stop calling that 'compiling'!

But sadly Ajax (aka JavaScript), the language that today makes MX2004 look good, IS the way back to the future....

It does let you do some very cool things, in the way that Flex used to let you do cool things and it does have its advantages no doubt.

I love HTML5 and CSS3 especially OO CSS3, and I have found I am actually enjoying coding again.

Hopefully despite the 'free for all' that Ajax seems today it will still reward someone who likes to put a little thought and structure into what they do!

There will still be a lot of Flex work, for a while at least, but no longer 24/7 and all the 'new stuff' will be Ajax.