Seven Reasons to be a Happy Flash Developer

There have been a lot of emotion in the Flex and Flash community over the past few days; regarding certain decisions that Adobe has made about Flex and Flash and their utter failure to communicate with us, the developer community. The news, and responses, have been overwhelming negative.

I grew up an eternal optimist. While I see a lot of challenge ahead, I also see a lot of opportunity.

Here are seven reasons I'm happy to be a Flash Developer today.

1. Adobe is focusing their Flash related efforts to allow us to easily build cross platform native applications. Let's face it; on mobile devices native apps are lot cooler than browser based apps.

   "Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores."

   Source

2. Flex being released to 3rd party open source foundation, most likely the Apache Foundation. This is kind of like the Spoon project with a +10 power up.

   "We are preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and BlazeDS at the Apache Software Foundation."

   Source

   Some of the smartest community members in the Flex Community involved. As a corollary I've heard some talk of decoupling Flex from the Flash / AIR runtimes so it can cross compile to alternate technologies such as HTML and JavaScript. Apparently Adobe even has a prototype on this which will be included as part of the open source code.

3. A lot of Adobe's Flex Roadmap discussed at Max will be implemented to completion, including the new Falcon Compiler, and some new spark components. Additionaly, Adobe will continue with Flash Builder, which is Adobe's best ActionScript editor.
4. The next version of Flash Player will be developed on Desktops; and that is all many Enterprise Applications Need anyway.

   "We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible"

   source

5. Adobe wants to use the Flash player to continue to extend the web. Many of their innovations will be used a test bed to bring things back to formal HTML standards bodies. PixelBender turning into CSS Shaders and the poster child of this approach.

   "We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible"

   Source

   This approach is good for web standards; and good for all developers. We could easily argue this is what early browser makers did, and continue to do to move forward HTML.

6. Many of the skills we have developed using Flash Platform tools will be easily applicable to the next generation of HTML5 related tools. That can give us a head start in the job market. Adobe is going to be adding HTML5 support for many of the tools we already know, such as the Flash Professional export to HTML feature.
7. And If all else fails, HTML approaches to cross browser development will take 2-8x longer depending on the tasks at hand. You can laugh all the way to the bank.

I don't know how this will all play out. I don't know what the future holds for me, The Flex Show, or Flextras. But, I'm cautiously optimistic about what the future holds.