About Apple I think they want to have control over app store at any coast ! They want people buying apps not using web apps :]. I hope one day they wont be able to control the apps users are using. But I am sure they definitely wont like people using web apps versus app store apps and they will do something about it when time arrives :].

No one wants Flex to be dead. No one wants Flash to be dead. That's not true, of course, but I personally don't. The point is that the market has spoken and it says that Flash and Flex are no longer cutting edge. They were best-of-breed when they were new, but they've both been superseded. Why they were superseded is a matter of debate, but I think we can all agree that Adobe has put fewer resources into Flash Player and Flex than the browser makers and JavaScript tooling providers have poured into their respective projects/products.

Don't get me wrong, I've built a good number of Flash-based applications and several decent sized Flex apps, all of which would have been impossible with JavaScript at the time. But even four years ago, I was already rewriting Flex apps in JavaScript because the performance was better, the environment was more functional, and the code more maintainable. Certain parts (like FDS for paging down tens of thousands of records and sorting them client-side) remain Flex, but the application changed to JavaScript. Which isn't to say it's all roses with JavaScript. Debugging support is a huge boon with Flex and FlashBuilder Pro. So is compile-type typechecking. But the dependency on DisplayObject, the very slow release cycles, the closedness Adobe has maintained over the project, etc. all make it an inferior choice even with it's huge selling points.

The Steve Jobs thing is a completely business-related issue, nothing to do with development. He didn't care about the development experience, he cared about the user experience. In his mind, making developers work twice as hard to give users a 10% better experience is a reasonable trade off. His argument against Flash was about speed of the UI and compute power needed to run it, both of which are sound. Flash Player was about control over the user experience. With Flash Player around, he wouldn't be able to control the apps which were deployed and ensure they met the high expectations for Apple-ecosystems products. Again, a valid set of choices to make, but not one I'm considering here. If Apple's refusal to allow Flash Player on iOS devices was the determining factor in Adobe abandoning Moible Flash Player they'd have done it 3-4 years ago, not hung on until now.

But seriously… CF developers talking about "other" languages as dead? That's hilarious!

I thought the comments would be a bunch of boring amen's but here we have two people who actually choked on the idea that Flex is dead?

A rudimentary search shows 325 jobs with html and 49 with flex on Portland's craigslist. Now you must understand that most of those flex's don't count due to the words "flex pay, flexible, flex your muscles" etc. The HTML results all do count due to its wonderful uniqueness.

There are a few positions left with real Flex among them as requirements, most are optional with HTML as an alternative.

I believe Barney meant Flex is dead like IE 6 is dead. It was dead, and then died a very slow and painful death. It doesn't mean it isn't still taking up market share http://micgadget.com/11633/why-the-chinese-still-favour-internet-explorer-6/.

Adobe has no qualms about jumping ship, it is smart business; don't be the last on board.

You'll note I didn't say it isn't used. However, the amount of resources pouring into moving the framework forward (let alone fixing the brokenness inside) is tiny compared to what is pushing comparable browser-technology-based frameworks forward. When Flex came out it was best of breed, so a lot of people started using it. Of course, the bar was quite low at that point. The bar is a lot higher now, but there is still huge momentum behind Flex, so it will continue to be used for quite some time.

That said, from a long-term perspective, Flex was pretty much DOA. It was based on a technology (Flash) which was already on the way down, and the implementation was lackluster to say the least. Adobe had the ability to take their existing Flash platform and wrap it with a bunch of "pretty developer stuff" and capture an emerging market, but they didn't try to build a stellar platform, they just went for the market. Which is totally legit, I might add. But when you grab that market share, then you have to evolve into something which can keep it, and they haven't done that (and would have had trouble trying due their binding to the underlying Flash stuff).

You have no clue.

Really? Flex died that long ago? I've been nothing but a Flex contractor for the last 6 years, and it's done nothing but grow and pop up in more and more places each year. I come across more Flex positions and offers in a single year than I ever did during my entire 8 year CF developer run combined. Heck, as I look through Dice for my metro area, there's probably 5 Flex positions for every 1 HTML5 position.

This pretty much echoes my thoughts on the subject as well.

-Rob