If you'll put in the pressure they will Flex

I have written before about my previous working place and how I’ve desperately tried to convince my superiors over there to make the move to Flash/Flex instead of our homebrew Active-x. Back then my CTO rudely dismissed the idea every time it came up.

More then two years after I’ve written this article, he (the CTO) was let go, and the company decided to make the move to Flash. I was no longer working there, but, it became a live or die situation for the company. It might seems that the CTO was the main blockage for this move but he wasn’t the only one. Almost anyone that had an opinion was against Flash. I remember my team leader determining repeatedly “It will never be Flash”. How about some hat eating, if you got any hats left 😉

It might sounds like I’m breaking even with them in this post, and it’s a somewhat true, but I still care for their success and do still keep in touch with most of them and help when I can. It’s just annoys me that people can be so short sighted sometimes.

Anyway, they are currently in an advanced phase of the development, rewriting the homebrew active-x functionalities in Actionscript 3.0. They use the Flex 2 editor although they use little to none of the Flex 2 framework.

Though it saddens me a little, that it was such a painful process for them to turn to the right path and also that I didn’t get to develop this cool Flash product by myself. I believe that I have set the foundation for this move, brightening on the capabilities of AS3 and the Flash VM2 and how it can switch the active-x. So I do feel comforted by the fact that they managed to do it, even if it’s in the 11th hour.

These days I work for jajah, which though it is a larger company, it is still much more younger and dynamic. But still, I encounter some of the same ignorance regarding Flash and non Microsoft technologies. While the use of Flash/Flex isn’t something that is life changing for jajah, yet. We can use it in a lot of places to improve our products. We recently released the Jajah Flash widget and currently working on some Flex stuff.

I still, from time to time hear the same old cliche, “How is your Macromedia/Adobe stocks are doing?”. The fact is that I’ve never had any Adobe stocks, the fact is that I’ve never argued for the use of Flash when it wasn’t simply the best or the only solution. When their will be any alternatives then we’ll see. Since then – Open your eyes, be flexible!

I will present my previous company cool new, Flash driven, product and all of the details, in here, ASAP.

Guy A

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