Flash, Flex & AIR Future – Via Adobe

|AIR,Mobile,News,TabletNo Comments
Flash, Flex & AIR Future – Via Adobe

On November 9th Adobe announced that the Flash Player on mobile would not be supported after FP 11.1. Over the following days statements regarding the future of the Flash Platform, Flex & AIR were also made. FYI here is a collection of those statements made by Adobe representatives (links to sources included in the footer).

UPDATE 18th Nov: Adobe have now posted a summary on the future of the flash platform and it’s products including:

  • Adobe’s transformation
  • Flash Player on desktop
  • Flash Player on mobile
  • AIR for Mobile
  • Flex
  • Flash Builder
  • Flash Professional
  • AIR for TV
  • Connect

If you want to know what is planned for the products above start by reading this Adobe developer connection post first and then if you need to know more about Flex’s future head over to this post on the Flex Team blog .

Flash:

  • Flash Player on mobile & TV (via browser) will not be supported after the 11.1 release
  • Flash Player on the desktop will continue
  • Flash Platform to focus on solutions for in browser Gaming & Premium Video
  • Research in Motion, as a source code licensee, to continue forward with enhancing Flash Player for Mobile on RIM’s QNX operating system

Flex:

  • Flex 4.6 SDK and it will be released on November 29th 2011.
  • After the 4.6 release the Flex SDK will be contributed to an open source foundation and continue under a new governance model.
  • Flex SDK feature development to be led by:
    • some developers from the Flex SDK engineering team
    • key developers from the Flex community (TBA) including members of the Spoon Project
    • contributors from enterprise companies currently using Flex
  • The Flex roadmap will be determined by the governing board once it’s been established
  • Adobe have stated they will continue to honor existing Flex support contracts
  • Many of the engineers and product managers who worked on Flex SDK will be moving to work on HTML5 tooling
  • Adobe recommending HTML5 as the long term best technology for enterprise application development
  • UPDATED
  • Adobe also plans to donate the following:
    • 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
  • members of the Flex product team along with Adobe evangelists will be organizing a multi-city international tour to enable more direct discussions.

AIR:

  • Development and support to continue for AIR on mobile, desktop and TV
  • Flash on mobile & TV to be enabled via AIR native apps
  • AIR 3.1 released Nov 10th with 3.2 in pre-release
  • AIR For TV apps will be supported

HTML5:

  • Adobe will increase investment in HTML5
  • PhoneGap to provide HTML5 to mobile app development solutions

Development Tools:

  • FlashBuilder will continue to be developed
  • Flash Professional development to continue
  • Development teams for both tools have been reduced

Sources:

Leave a Reply

Post Comment