[reitzensteinm]

If anyone is still interested in doing Flash development with Flex, do yourself a favor and check out Haxe:

http://haxe.org/

The AS3 compiler in Flex is junk. My buglist over the three years I used it was nearly 100 items long. I don't know of a single unfixed issue in Haxe.

Plus, if you write the code properly, you can port it to nearly a dozen platforms (serverside, plus all of the ones on http://haxenme.org).

I don't make Flash games any more except for hobby projects, but migrating off of Flex was the best decision I ever made.

[merdreubu]

This is actually an entirely new compiler written from scratch since 2010.

https://cwiki.apache.org/FLEX/falcon-overview.html

[reitzensteinm]

The problem with Flex wasn't its design, it was how buggy all of the edge cases were. Sound files randomly being replaced, weird compile errors that go away once you reset, code generation errors fixed by adding comments, occasional minute long compilation times, out of memory errors (again, reset the computer).

Frankly, complete rewrites under these circumstances are a cop out. It's an easy but ineffective path. What they should be doing is unit tests, isolating bugs and strictly controlling quality. Common bug reports should be triaged, rather than ignored (it's not uncommon to have a bug, and find a set of posts years old discussing workarounds). All it would take to fix Flex would be the will to do it.

The rewrite will have a whole different bunch of issues, and be similarly problematic. It's not like Flex was a bad apple in a bunch of well engineered Adobe software.

[OzzyB]

Did you ever see that movie where that guy suddenly wakes up in a pool of sweat gasping for air because of that nightmare sequence?

That's me when I remind myself of Flex development.

[farseer]

Same here!! One of my startups failed because we chose Flex/AIR as the development platform. Nearly tripled our development time, working around bugs in the platform.

[pcestrada]

I have 3 years doing full time Flex development. Have yet to see these problems. We deploy to Windows/Linux and Flash Player has been the closest to write once/run anywhere that we've seen. We have nothing but good things to say about Flex development.

[ivanb]

I've been writing in ActionScript 3/Flex for more than 3 years now and I don't really understand your problems. There never was a compiler bug that completely prevented me from doing my work. There always were easy workarounds to everything. The community is huge. I could always find the answer either by reading the documentation or googling.

Sincerely, compared to C++/Qt/WxWidgets, Python/Qt, Swing and even HTML/jQuery Adobe Flex was the most productive environment for frontend and desktop development for me.

It sounds that you did not have a prior experience in Flex otherwise you would know the kinks of the platform. I would say that it was not the choice of Flex that killed your startup but the uniformed choice of a technology that you never had a prior experience with.

[farseer]

3 years huh? I reckon you have never worked with Flex 2/3 then? The incident I am quoting is over 4 years old and I understand things may have improved with Flex 4. Specifically the Spark library drastically improved UI performance. However for us early adapters its too little too late. A Java backend with a Swing or HTML/JS front end is the safest route to go when programming for multiple platforms.

[pdaddyo]

A classic early bug that lost me hours and hours:

  if(true)  // i've forced this to true now
  {

     // this code is never reached because of that comment on the if() line

  }

[wtracy]

Please ... tell me you are joking.

Edit: I don't disbelieve you just, wow, that is amazingly bad.

[mrmiller]

+1 for Haxe. One of the coolest projects happening right now, IMO. The community is awesome too. I'm just in love with it!

[chipsy]

I've been using Haxe for several years. I heartily recommend it, even outside of Flash and JS targets where it's strongest. The compiler is very solid. You can still expect to be filling in some gaps in library support - but the other side of that is that it's often very straightforward to appropriate code written for your target platform and use that instead.

[Trufa]

I'm generally against all in one tools/silver bullets, but haxe is getting so much good feedback I think I will give it a try at least!