Comment by columbo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by columbo | Hacker News Reader

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Flex...

I thought flex was great. I really did. The funny thing is I used to do a bunch of cold fusion work back in the day so I already had firsthand experience with Adobe's complete lack of interest in supporting a developer platform. All I have to say is "allaire homesite", most CFdevs should remember.

Nevertheless I got involved a handful of huge flex applications. This was back when it was Apollo, so 07/08. Firefox was gaining traction but not much, Jquery didn't really exist and google was for searching, not web browsing.

These apps looked beautiful, every pixel was accounted for, they were responsive(ish) and, the best part, when they were done they were DONE (mostly). No more trying to support IE5.5 or IE6. Flex was something you could sell to an enterprise shop.

Then native technologies finally caught up. The IPhone, perhaps rightly so, gave a huge middle finger to Adobe. Then JQuery, then Bootstrap comes into the picture and... amazingly... the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries.

Flex was really just a means to an end. For devs like me it meant I didn't have to code another $#@! table layout or drop-down-select or menu-navigation or accordion.

On one hand I feel the industry caught up to Flex and the better player (native support) won. I feel that I shouldn't personally blame Adobe on this one. On the other hand I know that Adobe has killed off so much through their process of atrophy-driven-development that I can't help but want to point a (very specific) finger at them.

Eh, yeah, at this point when I hear Adobe I walk away, I can't blame them for everything, but I've lost all faith in their ability to deliver.

the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries.

People learning html/js/css today have no idea how incredible they have it. They don't even have to think about IE compatibility!

I used a lazy evaluation strategy for my life: in 2007 after it became clear to me how ... well, awful ... the webdev technologies were, I switched fields for a few years. And hey, presto, now in 2013 everything works. And works well! I can be a web developer with about 1/3rd of the effort it would've taken me in '07.

EDIT: Actually, after spending a few minutes remembering what those times were like, I'd say nowadays it's a lot more than 3x easier. It's now at least 10x easier to write webapps, if not 30x.

The vast majority of one's time was spent hacking around various unexpected behaviors and incompatibilities.

For sure, certain things have gotten a lot better. Supporting IE8 (still for a bit) is far better than supporting IE6/7.

But there are new areas that inspire a kill-me-now reaction. If you've tried to do anything serious with controlling HTML5 audio via JavaScript, for example -- it's a nightmarish maze of different commands and event names and varying functionalities and crashing bugs that vary from browser to browser and version to version.

Ajax calls ... I remember how painful that was before jQuery.

I wonder too if being around before jQuery took the prize has something to do with why I hesitate with new technologies, especially when so many try to fill the same need. Had I not picked jQuery I would have had to rewrite everything in whatever had caught on.

So yes, you're absolutely right; they are so lucky to have missed those dreary times.

I spent a few years doing Flash/Flex development back then as well. I don't know if this was ever a problem for you, but I always found Flex to be, well, kind of slow.

All that data binding and event bubbling was convenient for the developer, but you certainly paid a price for it at runtime. Most of the Flex apps I encountered during that time period (even very simple ones) just seemed to run so sluggishly. That type of user experience might have been okay for internal corporate type applications but I never really found it suitable for the web. And of course on top of that you had to deal with the SWF loading times too.

Flash/Flex definitely had its time in the spotlight but I can see why it ended up dying out.

I really miss working with the Flex framework, even after all these years being away from it. The layout features were so comprehensive, data binding was expressive and very very simple. All the source code was available right in the editor to inspect, so making a new component that conformed to the behavior of builtin components was really easy. And lastly the skinning was just awesome, every time I have to create a custom control in IOS I hang my head and wish I had the skinning features flex had.

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