The random utterances of David Arno

Monday 20th February, the sun had set on London and one hundred or so folk gathered near Waterloo station for special Flex London User Group (FLUG) meeting. It was a presentation by Adobe on what is happening with Flex from their perspective. We were treated to a personal visit from Deepa Subramaniam, along with the new Flash Builder product manager, Adam Lehman and evangelist Michael Chaize. It was an interestingly frank presentation, with plenty of questions asked, many of them answered in a positive way. In addition, Peter Elst and Tink discussed what was happening with Apache Flex.

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Yesterday, Adobe published their long-awaited “roadmap” for Flex: Adobe’s view of Flex and its commitments to Flex in the future. Sadly for those of us involved in the Apache Flex podling, the following piece is seriously bad news:

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After a lot of voting and a fair bit of tweaking, Apache Flex has a new logo:

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This article seeks to detail how to write a node.js module in CoffeeScript, for both Windows and Linux. The Linux instructions may well work on OS X too, but as I do not have a Mac, I haven’t tested that environment. The article takes you through ensuring node.js and required modules are installed, that the coffee-script library can be accessed and then on to writing, installing and running an executable module. Finally it shows you some refactoring to enable all of the module code to be written in CoffeeScript.

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Back in November, just after Adobe announced they were donating Flex to Apache, I posted a suggestion for a Flex salvage project. This project would involve porting the Flex AS3 code to haXe and using the latter’s ability to target JavaScript to turn Flex into a framework that could run on HTML5.

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With Adobe’s relegation of Flash to the web sidelines last November, I finally decided that maybe I should take a serious look at JavaScript. One of the first things I discovered was a beautifully simple, elegant and lightweight “syntactic sugar” language built on JavaScript called CoffeeScript. So I figured I’d install the compiler and get experimenting…

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Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post entitled “JavaScript is a toy language.” It proved a controversial post, which – with hindsight – I should have expected. Two years on, much has changed in the programming world and much has changed with my position on JavaScript. So I thought it time I revisited the topic.

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This week, Adobe held a summit on their plans for handing Flex over to the Apache Software Foundation. A small sample of the Flex user base was invited to attend, but for the rest of us they made recordings of the first day available, and streamed the second day live, which was much better as it gave a sense of taking part, rather than just passively watching what had gone before. Others have summarised what was covered in those two days, so I won’t repeat them here.

The summit seems to have divided opinion: some feel that Adobe are abandoning Flex to die; others feel it is an exciting opportunity for the Flex community. To my mind there is no dichotomy here: Adobe are abandoning Flex and that creates an exciting opportunity for the Flex community. It also creates some challenges and there is a danger that many in the community seem to be in denial of those challenges.

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This is part 2 of a of two-part article about the Try { harder } conference. I’d recommend reading days 1 & 2 first as this article will likely make more sense that way.

After a full day’s pair programming workshop, day 3 (Wednesday) was a much more normal conference-style day involving a series of technical presentations.

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