Hey Adobe! What about us Flex developers?
Having developed Flex for several years now I am getting really tired of Adobe’s lack of support for developers. I was hoping they would bring at least modest improvements to Flex Builder (now Flash Builder) 4, but it is not much better. Re-factoring support is almost non-existent, something I consider fundamental to the development process. Even simple renaming and moving of classes and variables doesn’t work properly. Code Formatting is still missing. And why can they still not get proper code navigation? What I mean is why can you only navigate up the class hierarchy and not down?
The most painful part of the development experience for me is how slow visual design is. The visual editor is useless. So all layout has to be done by hand. But even making a single change to the layout of a component, it re-compiles the entire project.
And there seem to be an endless amount of bugs. For example we recently found you can not have multiple projects that use locales. Or odd behavior, like changing the server side support in project properties messes up the entire project.
If I where to choose a new UI framework today I would have to seriously re-consider whether to use Flex. I would want to look at the entire development eco-system around alternatives. I think this is where JavaFX might be able to take the lead. It all depends on what Oracle does with NetBeans and JavaFX of course, but we can always hope.
