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Monday March 29, 2004

Macromedia Flex 1.0 Released

Macromedia has released Flex 1.0. Flex is basically a server plugin that allows you to write XML to render flash. Here's the marketing lingo from their product page:

Flex is a presentation server installed on top of a J2EE application server or servlet container, a rich library of user interface components, an XML-based markup language used to declaratively lay out these components, and an object-oriented programming language which handles user interactions with the application. The result is a Rich Internet Application rendered using Flash Player and developed using industry standards and a development paradigm familiar to developers.

The major problem with Flex is its price.

Flex presentation server pricing starts at $12,000 for two CPUs and includes annual maintenance.

Macromedia's take on this seems to be "its an evolutionary step in web application design and development" - so $12K is a small drop in the bucket. Sun claims the same for JSF, but you don't see a hefty price tag on that sucker. What Macromedia doesn't seem to realize is that its important to market to developers. If you can inspire the developers to love your product - it's only natural that it will gain more traction. With a price of 12K and no free trial (CD by mail) - good luck on getting developer support.

Of course, as an independent consultant, I probably have a scewed perspective. Maybe the corporate drones like getting their development platform and tools shoved down their throat.

Posted in Java at Mar 29 2004, 07:36:10 AM MST 9 Comments
Comments:

I agree, this seems pretty crazy. Take the product once known as forte. It was a distributed object oriented solution that had potential of being a real player in the early 90’s. It was a completely integrated environment that was marketed as a business programming language (4GL). It had many features superior to J2EE EJB. Its cost was 9K per developers seat plus server deployment fees. Had its install base and developer community been greater, Sun wouldn’t have been able to snuff it out as easily as they did. I’ve been following your dialog on the struts developers group. What’s your take on the future of struts?

Posted by Gary VanMatre on March 29, 2004 at 10:04 AM MST #

If Struts can abandon ActionForms and let us developers use our POJOs in the UI, I think it'll be golden. I also think that it needs to continue to allow validation on POJOs - via interceptors or AOP. I think Struts has a long life ahead of it - too many people are using it for it to die in the next couple of years. Example: JSP.

That being said, I also think it has an opportunity to (once again) become the MVC Framework of choice. However, smart decisions have to made about the new architecture. In other words - they need to abandon all notions of backwards compatibility and go with what is the cleanest and simplest approach.

Posted by Matt Raible on March 29, 2004 at 10:42 AM MST #

Hmm.... I was really excited about Flex based on the early buzz, but the pricing does sap my enthusiasm. I do note that their web site mentions special ISV pricing (and a $8.99 trial version, which is close to free). For a 6 figure enterprise project, 12K would be no big deal. But I'd prefer to use a new technology such as this on a small project first, which is nearly impossible with this cost.

Posted by Will on March 29, 2004 at 10:56 AM MST #

That would be nice but it sounds allot like like JSF. But, I suppose that you could argue that JSP is just a lazy servlet, custom tag or JSF render? I still don't understand the value of using struts and JSF outsided of tiles?

Posted by Gary VanMatre on March 29, 2004 at 11:06 AM MST #

http://www.macromedia.com/flex/samples/flexstore/flexstore.mxml?versionChecked=true

It about time we get rid of html/http. It free to develop.
Cost is an issue, just like Forte. But Laslo and others, somone will come up with a good price w/ similar features, sort of PowerBuilder w/ no run time fee. Even Cold Fusion is $3K unlimited CPU.

.V

Posted by Vic on March 29, 2004 at 12:17 PM MST #

Anyone who knows Marc Canter will know that he hates Macromedia. However, I found it interesting to read his post on Flex. Apparently, Flex was an idea stolen from Laszlo Systems. I guess the good news in all of this is that Laszlo offers the same thing, only cheaper.

<div style="margin-left: 30px; font-style: italic"> ... a free Developers Edition, a subscription-based Enterprise Edition starting at quarterly rate of $4,500 for each server CPU the software runs on and a light-duty Express Edition priced at a flat $1,000 per CPU.</div>

Posted by Matt Raible on March 29, 2004 at 12:50 PM MST #

re: they need to abandon all notions of backwards compatibility and go with what is the cleanest and simplest approach. Could still call it struts then? Isn't it really something else at that point? It just have the same label. People would need to covert and get up speed, just like they are picking up a different framework. Why not just call Webwork2=Struts2? I am not disagreeing with, what they need to do, I just see it hard to keep the old developers and implement a fresh "cleanest and simplest approach". Perhaps its hard when you get to big/popular, because it inhibits your ability to change. Matt

Posted by Matt P. on March 29, 2004 at 01:21 PM MST #

Bend over, Macromedia is at it again. I have a love/hate relationship with Macromedia. They've got some decent products and make some sweet innovations. But! They slit their own throats with their atrocious pricing and horrendous quality control. Remember Generator? Exactly. Flash Communication Server? It's nearly gone. Could have been huge, but they priced it for the Fortune 500, keeping it out of reach for those that would have helped make it big. If it wasn't for open-source alternatives, Flash Remoting (an incredibly important add-on for Flash) would be history. I can't help but see Flex dead in the water. Who's going to drop 12K on a Macromedia-quality product without substantial community support? Sad.

Posted by Jacob Hanson on March 31, 2004 at 11:56 AM MST #

Obviously no one over at Macromedia has read the book, The Idea Virus by Seth Goldin. His theory is to market a product by first giving it away for free and then once it is a must have tool/product, charge the going rate. Google, Yahoo, and others have followed this model, and now they are giants. And the idea that developers need to be on board it key to the success of a product. You get everyone using the product, and then you make profits later. Another great example of this is with Microsoft not entering into the Enterprise Software areana for CRM. Instead they are opting to make Outlook 2003 have tons more CRM capabilities and after everyone is using these tools, they will enter the Enterprise Market and destroy their competitors... the reason is simple... everyone already has it on their machine and they know how to use it. rp

Posted by rascalpants on April 21, 2004 at 10:05 AM MDT #

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