Flex looking good

A couple days ago, Macromedia released their scriptable server-application Flex and the community has received it well, except for some mentioning the Macromedia track record for enterprise applications.

Flex is sort of Flash for coders. There's no graphical frontend, just a serverside program that will turn scripts into a Flash-based internet application. You may use authoring tools like Flash, WebSphere Studio Application Developer or the upcoming "Brady" tool from Macromedia to make your Flash application. But you could also use a text editor such as Notepad to type MXML, the scripting language for Flex. Flex can do pretty much all the stuff Flash can do, but it is geared towards internet applications. Some things are easier to do with Flash and some are easier to do with Flex. To make a long story short, Flex has gotten a great reception. Developers from all camps say it looks and performs great.

Flex is targeted at larger companies, developing big scale applications, using the Flash SWF format. Flex can do all the stuff Flash can do, but with tools that enterprise developers will easily grasp. The market is pretty narrow, but the rewards can be huge if the product is a success.

Macromedia used to have a product that did well at the medium/big enterprise - Macromedia Generator. The Generator codebase was getting old and hard to extend and many of it's functions could easily be done using clientside Flash. Due to that, Macromedia discontinued the product (no sales or support) and they had nothing new to replace it with. They could have kept Generator there without doing anything with it and now claimed Flex to be the successor. By not doing this, they caused a lot of frustration with the enterprises that had put their bets on Generator.

There has been some discussion about the pricing of Flex. We don't think $12000 is a lot for enterprice companies. This is not a high volume product like Flash or Dreamweaver and its feature set is great. Let's just hope the enterprises forget fast and that Macomedia will not change the entire API for each new release like they've gotten sort of a reputation for? Some of these companies also bought Generator for the enterprice price of almost $40000 just to see the price sliced to one tenth the month after. A few months later, Generator was discontinued. Now Macromedia will try to sell Flex to the same companies. That could be a hard sell, despite the rave reviews.
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