Monday, October 26, 2009

Adobe Flex and commercial component libraries

Do you also think that Adobe Flex lacks a component library update? Yes, I know Spark is around the corner but after more than 2 years I'm not looking for less, I really need more. New components, new functionality within the existing components.

As far as I'm concerned Adobe doesn't have to come up with these components itself. Third party components with a decent licensing scheme (comparable to the 3rd party components available for Silverlight) would be perfect. Apart from ILOG Elixir (that comes with problematic licensing options) there's hardly anything out there. Even Dough Mcune with his fantastic Flexlib library seems to have given up.

But @ Adobe nobody seems to care, at least not in a positive way. Otherwise they wouldn't attack Flashden, probably the biggest Flash marketplace out there.

So Adobians, please tell me today instead of tomorrow if you're not serious about your own development products anymore! I start wondering whether you are being paid by Microsoft to let Flex die silently...

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Both Kap Lab and Axiis has a set of very solid components useful for data visualization (yes, only those 2 examples come into my mind, that's all)

http://creative-geeks.com/blog/?p=411

I agree with you, without Adobe (technology vendor) support for single marketplace for commercial components, Flex SDK will lean behind Silverlight

Ricardo said...

This is really something that Microsoft does well and Adobe does wrong.
The lack of component libraries by third parties is a huge disadvantage of Flex versus Silverlight and Adobe doesn't seem to notice.
Adobe should put money on this as soon as possible.

Gus said...

Well I think that the main advantage of Flex is that is so easy to create or improve components that there is no need for 3rd party components or at least for the basics components. Specially with Flex4 the component creation is improved... so I think 3rd parties are not as needed as in other platforms

Patrick said...

For us this is a nice opportunity for 3rd part developpers, we can extend provided libraries and develop strong and reliable components.
To complete what jabbypanda said, there is also www.flex-component.com that provides new flex components like our best seller KC-Calendar component.