Oscar Trelles

Flex Love/Hate: Shaping the Future of Flash

Mixed feelings this week. While everybody agrees with the huge potential of Flex, as a powerful platform for RIAs delivery, it’s initial pricing has almost everybody turned down. The little guy wants to play with it too, but with no enterprise level budgets to justify a single license, lots of great ideas will not meet Flex in production soon enough. Or will they?

If you work in a large enterprise, you are most probably familiar with licensing prices for control version applications, content management suites and collaboration tools, that can be 3 or 4 times what Macromedia is asking for Flex. I was recently involved in some product research for a client; we were looking for a cost-effective enterprise level content management system, and the price quotes we got ranged from $40k to $160k. That’s one of the reasons my jaw didn’t drop on monday when we all learned Flex’s price tag. Since the beginning, Flex was marketed stressing the fact that it was targeted to “enterprises”, although a formal definition is missing.

Small shops will have to wait until a volume licensing is available to hosting providers. While it happens, you can either start working with Flex’s developer edition, or explore other alternatives. I ordered the trial CD on monday, but I learned today that Flex’s developer edition will be available to DevNet Pro subscribers… a bit too late to cancel the order. Anyway, even the trial version needs the underlying support to be worthwhile; remember that you would need ColdFusion or J2EE running on your server, etc. Here is the list of requirements for different platforms, just in case you were wondering. If all the ROI talk over at Macromedia’s Flex Home doesn’t convince you, or you just can’t afford preparing a server just to try Flex, you can try Laszlo’s solution, which has a developers edition available for free, right now. I just downloaded it, so I’ll give it a try later, probably during the weekend.

Regardless of your decisions in the short-term, the most important aspect of Flex is that it is bringing together people from very different backgrounds. I remember having a conversation with Sean Corfield around this subject, back in Sydney during MXDU’s speakers BBQ; Flex is coming to close the gap between the ‘traditional’ Flash developers and designers, and those hardcore application developers, harnessing the collective effort toward a single objective: create richer experiences. During the time of the beta, I’ve got the feeling that some fellow Flashers where confused about what would their role be once Flex released. Some felt threatened by the idea of their job being taken over by the new players in the Flash game. Not quite. As I wrote in a comment over at Daemonite, I think “it is probably easier for Flash IDE users to learn Flex, than for hardcore developers to deal with the Timeline. Let’s don’t forget that Flex only generates RIAs based on Flash content already existent in the form of SWC files on the server.” Flex is designed to compile MXML files into SWFs, based on components already existent in the server. So, unless they want everything Halo, somebody needs to create Flash materials before hand. And those are the new opportunities Flex generates for us!

Ultimately, Flex will help pushing up Flash as a platform for serious application development. The days of Flash being synonymous of cheesy advertising and annoying popups are counted.