I went fishing and pulled out a golden fish, and the three wishes were brought to my attention. You know the drill. But this was an unusual little fish – she was specializing in software wishes only.  So I used my opportunity, and here’s what I’ve asked about Adobe Flex.

1.    Please make Flex Builder faster.  
The slowness of Flex Builder is irritating. I’m not talking about creating small Flex widgets. Currently, I live in Eclipse IDE with lots of Java and Flex projects sitting under the same roof.  Rebuilding a small Flex project may take a minute, it may hose your machine for a while leaving you staring helplessly at the right corner that reads “Building Workspace - 29%”. Recommendations like close other projects or increase the heap size on the startup of Eclipse do not get you far. To put it simple, Java developers have seen better IDEs.

2.    Please improve Flex Printing.
Asking PDF creators to improve printing may sound like nonsense. But guess what, some people would like to have a simple printing of the data displayed on the screen on the client side. Now we are talking hacking. How to provide proper spacing based on the font? Creating a preview screen with zooming and scaling is not straightforward. What about page margins? Various paper sizes?
Of course, Adobe can offer you server side PDF generation…if you purchase a commercial license of LCDS. But I’d be really happy to see something better than rudimentary printing capabilities available in Flex SDK.

3.    Please improve the Flex release process
I started actively working with Flex 2 in January of 2006. By the Summer of 2006, I was thinking about wearing a T-shirt which would read “I survived Flex 2 Alpha, Beta 3, Beta 2, Beta 1 and production releases.”  There were serious API changes between each of these releases.  At the time, we’ve been working on the sample application for the book, which had to be re-written and regression-tested over and over again. But beside writing a book, we’ve been also working on Flex components based on Flex SDK, and every change of the API would take time to account for .
   
It’s great that Flex SDK framework is extendable, and we are using this extensibility on a daily basis. For example, we were extending  RTMP protocol (packaged with FDS) to add some additional quality of service information.  All of a sudden FDS 2.0.1 is gone, LCDS 2.5 comes into picture and API for pushing messages from the server to the client is changed.  Sure enough, we had to spend time to re-implement and re-test what we already did for FDS.

My message to Flex team is simple, “Guys, you did a great job with Flex framework, but it’s out of the cage now, and people are actually using it as a foundation for their professional work. You can’t just change API whenever you fill like it. This is not a green field situation anymore.  Look at Java – there is tons of deprecated API that’s carried over from release to release. Of course, it leads to a lot of unused code in JDK itself, but at least it gives third-party developers a chance to plan upgrades of their software accordingly.
 
By the way, what happen to Flex Data Services 2.0.1?  The Flex download site does not offer this product anymore.  Why do you force everyone to immediately migrate to LCDS 2.5?

Anyway, I let the fish go. Let’s see what happens.