The future of Flex from the mouth of Adobe and my thoughts - cfObjective ColdFusion Flex

So I attended CfObjective ANZ today.  It was a good day great to catch up with alot of the people from the community that I haven't seen for a while and and those that I see regularly at the Melbourne ColdFusion and Flex usergroup.  The venue was really quite nice and the food was some of the best I have had at a conference.

One of the main factors of attending this year was to find out from Adobe and the community how we are supposed to react to Adobe's messages recently about Flash and Flex.  I think we all feel Adobe PR have done a poor job of communicating the changes and alot of people want to know the real truth.  Part of what was re-iterated was:

Adobe have stopped development of the Mobile Flash player ONLY.

Moving the following projects to the Apache foundation:

• Complete, but yet-to-be-released, Spark components, including ViewStack, Accordion, DateField, DateChooser and an enhanced DataGrid.
• BlazeDS, the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex applications.
• Falcon, the next-generation MXML and ActionScript compiler that is currently under development (this will be contributed when complete in 2012)
• Falcon JS, an experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript.
• Flex testing tools, as used previously by Adobe, so as to ensure successful continued development of Flex with high quality

 Ok that's good so far.  I don't do any development targeted to the mobile flash player, matter of fact I don't know anyone who has or did.  What I do know is I use Flex and Flex to iOS and Android.  While the Framework is open source and Adobe are committed to releasing 4.6 ( which I eagerly await ) I asked about the future of FlashBuilder ( FlexBuilder ) in regards to future releases on Flex ( 4.7 ).  What I wanted to hear was that Adobe will continue to evolve this product for future Air and Flexmobile and normal PC based Flex projects.  The straight answer I got was "Yes"

I also asked if the name would change back to FlexBuilder and sadly that was no.  Oh well.

We all work in a rapidly changing environment and have to adapt as technology changes but nobody wants to invest a significant amount of time and resources in a language/framework to what the carpet pulled out from under them so today we did hear some good news.  With the addition of the AS/MXML to HTML and JS compiler to be released we have some promising options to look forward to.

On the ColdFusion front I had nothing to worry about but did hear some nice news that in the next 24 months Adobe has 4 planed releases ( probably 2 ColdFusion versions and 2 CFBuilder updates ) which is a good thing.

One of my favorite sessions of the day was Kai's session on tuning the jvm.  I have alot of servers I look after and it's quite a science and Kai really knows whats going on and helped convert into understandable english what we can do and where to look to extract the best performance possible from our coldfusion servers.

Looking forward to day 2!