Why can’t Flex get into the CS Party?
November 6th, 2008
That might sound like a weird question to ask. After all, “Creative” isn’t exactly a word that you would use to describe Flex. But with all the advantages it has over coding in the IDE, it saves me time that I can use to do the creative stuff. And it’s made the by the same company, so, why not?
The main reason I ask, to be honest, is that I’m hooked. Once you get to work with things like magical imports and that cool little feature that displays the constructor arguments for you, how could you go back?
If the editor in the IDE leaves much to be desired, why not give all us designer+developers an easy way to get Flex as part of a suite? It could find a place in Web Premium, or even maybe Master Suite if you want to get a little crazy. “Creative Suite… now with Flex!”
Yeah, there are other free or much cheaper options that you can set up to do pretty much the same thing that Flex does. But Flex could become the one that you didn’t have to go through any extra effort or cost to get your hands on if it was part of a suite. That couldn’t really hurt, right?
Obviously, this post is being written half jokingly. In all seriousness though, I wonder if it would easier for the new folks to take that next step in picking up AS3 if a solid code editor was more easily available however or whichever way that might come about.
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6 Comments
Iain Says:
I guess one reason is that the Thermo features are still in development, so wouldn’t have been ready. Maybe in CS 5?
November 7th, 2008 at 5:08 am
Adrian Says:
Programmers aren’t invited to creative parties
But now a bit more serious:
Maybe because its based on eclipse not developed by Adobe. And eclipse is no proprietary software - the others in the CS Party are. So nobody invites it
November 7th, 2008 at 5:52 am
val Says:
Good point Adrian, I didn’t think of that. Might be part of the reason for sure.
and yes, hopefully by CS5 there’s some better workflow built in for all us designer/developer folks!
November 7th, 2008 at 8:39 am
Alan Says:
My guess is that it’s not really necessary to include it in a paid product like CS.
Flex is free to download and Flex Builder is just Eclipse sans Java. I used to use Flex Builder, but now I use Zend Studio with the Flex Plugin and all the functionality is the same.
As far as an IDE for Actionscript, Textmate is truly incredible. My IDEs used to be Flash / Flex Builder, now it’s Flash, Zend, and Textmate. Look into it.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Ethan Estes Says:
I think an issue is that their development cycles are one half off-so each release comes half way through the other. Very hard to work in the integration across the suite when you’ve built on eclipse and it’s release schedule. Not impossible but not the same when you write it from scratch and own all the code.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Matthew Fabb Says:
I definitely think it has to do with release cycles more than anything else.
The match up the release cycles, Flex Builder 4 would have to be delayed to be released with CS5. Or following Flex Builder 4, we would have a small increment release (version 4.1? 4.5?) to go along with CS5 and then have to wait longer than we should for Flex Builder 5. Neither option makes much business sense.
Plus with the upcoming Thermo likely to be released together with Flex Builder 4, Adobe will have now 2 products in a different release cycle. Which also from a business side of things makes more sense rather than Adobe’s revenue going up and down based on the CS release cycle, have two major products spaced out. Perhaps pull off Dreamweaver and add it to Flex Builder and Thermo for a separate DS (Developer Suite)?
November 7th, 2008 at 12:38 pm