Re: [Laszlo-dev] Adobe Flex official Proposal for Apache Incubator
One correction on Laszlo's business model: Since the Laszlo Mail /
Laszlo Webtop product, the company has moved away from doing custom
OpenLaszlo development projects. The former "Laszlo Studios" are now
part of the "Professional Services" division. Before Laszlo Mail, the
company did mainly LPS/OpenLaszlo consulting jobs.
On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 12:28 PM, Raju Bitter
<r.bitter.mailinglists@...> wrote:
> And an interesting German article bei Kai Koenig:
> http://www.heise.de/developer/artikel/Die-Zukunft-von-Flex-1400734.html
>
> On a side-note: Kai worked for the first company selling Flex 1
> licenses in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We won our first
> commercial OpenLaszlo project over here (back in 2005) when one of
> their customers was not willing to pay for the Flex/ColdFusion license
> for an upgrade of their website. Still remember that the customer
> complained: "To replace the existing Flash frontend with a Flex one,
> we have to upgrade our ColdFusion license, upgrade the server, pay
> around $ 12,000 for the Flex license, just to be able to use that
> technology".
> The customer saw the Laszlo Dashboard, and wanted to build something
> similar for their website:
> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/stewart/page/rich-internet-application-gallery-openlaszlo/39?pg=5
>
> Reminds me of what Yakov Fain said in his blog post, 6 years later:
> "Requesting $100K+ for a typical setup of LCDS servers simply killed
> this technology. During the last 5 years only one of our clients was
> using LCDS and this was four years ago."
>
> Strange, how companies continue to make the same mistakes over the years.
>
>
> On Sat, Dec 24, 2011 at 11:42 AM, Raju Bitter
> <r.bitter.mailinglists@...> wrote:
>> A week later, there are some interesting blog posts, trying to capture
>> what the Flex community thinks of an Apache Flex:
>>
>> http://www.adamflater.net/2011/12/14/apache-flex-beginning/
>> http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2011/12/22/update-on-the-apache-flex-incubator-proposal/
>>
>> http://yakovfain.com/2011/12/15/the-future-of-the-flex-framework-in-enterprise-it/
>> Yakov Fain has some good points, in my eyes. One of his colleagues
>> will be on of the initial committers for an Apache Flex, and Farata
>> has been working with Flex long enough to know the Flex/enterprise
>> world. Here are his conclusions:
>> 1. Flex remains my first choice framework for developing RIA and AIR
>> for developing desktop and mobile applications.
>> 2. I’m also planning to go deep under the skin of one JavaScript
>> framework, and it’s not jQuery. I like to have more than one tool in
>> my toolbox.
>> 3. Our company, Farata Systems will offer commercial technical support
>> for Flex, AIR and BlazeDS both on the desktops and on tablets. We’ll
>> make an official announcement about it shortly.
>> 4. Our company continues offering training in Flex and Java as we
>> always did, but next spring we’ll add a class “HTML5/JavaScript for
>> Enterprise Developers”.
>> 5. Under such management Adobe won’t last long and will have to be
>> acquired by another company.
>>
>> And in a comment he continues: "One of the main Adobe’s issues with
>> Flex was their inability to monetize this tool. Another good example
>> of this is their absolutely stupid pricing policy for LiveCycle Data
>> Services. Requesting $100K+ for a typical setup of LCDS servers simply
>> killed this technology. During the last 5 years only one of our
>> clients was using LCDS and this was four years ago. Everyone else was
>> happy with free BlazeDS.
>> LiveCycle is yet another super expensive monster.
>> I wish Adobe luck – they still employ a number of great people, but I
>> lost my interest in this company after they turned their back on lots
>> of their loyal customers and partners."
>>
>> Reading "inability to monetize this tool", hey, that's OpenLaszlo. But
>> it's good to see that other companies - like Ferata - are willing to
>> step and provide commercial support for Flex and BlazeDS, which
>> probably will be Apache projects very soon. That could have been a
>> good model for OpenLaszlo. Laszlo's main business has never been
>> OpenLaszlo consulting or offering professional support for the
>> platform. But there never was any partner offering commercial platform
>> support to enterprises.
>>
>> - Raju
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 2:05 PM, Raju Bitter
>> <r.bitter.mailinglists@...> wrote:
>>> Thanks, Sebastian. Based on what I've read and seen (small demo apps
>>> on video) of Falcon JS, Adobe doesn't believe in the JS
>>> cross-compilation feature. The reason is that the Flex components are
>>> much too heavyweight. I though that the new component set they are
>>> working on for the next release would be more light-weight, but they
>>> probably need to support the old APIs.
>>>
>>> Think of it: an app with a few buttons generated into 5 MB of JS code!
>>> For OpenLaszlo DHTML, that's less than 600k (uncompressed, in both
>>> cases). For OpenLaszlo, Falcon JS might even work with better
>>> performance, since the decision to use Sprites as the base class for
>>> visual objects can be perfectly matched to using views. But in the
>>> presentation video on Falcon JS, the Adobe managers use words like
>>> "experimental", "release by the end of 2012", "not sure if the concept
>>> to cross-compile Flex to JS will work" a lot.
>>>
>>> Adobe has one of the Apache co-founders on-board, since they acquired
>>> Swiss company Day Software: Roy Fielding
>>> http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
>>> I can imagine that he's very well connected within the ASF, and that
>>> will definitely help Adobe with an Apache Flex.
>>>
>>> I don't know what the ASF members think, but the idea to have a
>>> compiler as an ASF project which only compiles to Flash bytecode,
>>> that's not what I'd expect from an ASF project - unless there's a
>>> clear dedication to creating alternative runtimes. But I have never
>>> dealt with the ASF, so I don't know. What was your feedback when you
>>> got OpenMeetings into the incubation process, since OpenMeetings uses
>>> Flash and some Adobe protocols?
>>>
>>> - Raju
>>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 20, 2011 at 10:16 AM, seba.wagner@...
>>> <seba.wagner@...> wrote:
>>>> Good points on your questions on the incubator list Raju :)
>>>>
>>>> 2011/12/19 seba.wagner@... <seba.wagner@...>
>>>>
>>>>> Its official ^^ Adobe's proposal on the botton ...
>>>>>
>>>>> Maybe interesting to see the Proposal and also the discussion on the
>>>>> Apache List:
>>>>> http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/
>>>>>
>>>>> Sebastian
>>>>>
>>>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>>>>> From: Alex Harui <aharui@...>
>>>>> Date: 2011/12/19
>>>>> Subject: [PROPOSAL] Flex for Apache Incubator
>>>>> To: "general@..." <general@...>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Hi everyone,
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to propose Flex to be an Apache Incubator project.
>>>>>
>>>>> Here's a link to the proposal:
>>>>> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/FlexProposal
>>>>>
>>>>> Thank you,
>>>>>
>>>>> Alex Harui
>>>>> Flex SDK Team
>>>>> Adobe Systems, Inc.
>>>>> http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscribe@...
>>>>> For additional commands, e-mail: general-help@...
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>> Sebastian Wagner
>>>>> http://www.openmeetings.de
>>>>> http://incubator.apache.org/openmeetings/
>>>>> http://www.webbase-design.de
>>>>> http://www.wagner-sebastian.com
>>>>> seba.wagner@...
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Sebastian Wagner
>>>> http://www.openmeetings.de
>>>> http://incubator.apache.org/openmeetings/
>>>> http://www.webbase-design.de
>>>> http://www.wagner-sebastian.com
>>>> seba.wagner@...
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