Comments on: Review of Flex/Flash Builder 4 – Defective By Design?

By: Google Abandons Maps for Adobe Flash/Air | Down Home Country Coding With Scott Selikoff and Jeanne Boyarsky

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:42:06 +0000

[…] Following the release of Flash Builder 4, Adobe decided to take Flex in a different direction, one I objected to in my review of Flash Builder 4, focusing more on wooing designers than developers with its new skinning interface. In fact, prior […]

By: Master_Will

Master_Will — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 04:55:32 +0000

In Spring of 2011, I was very excited at the fact that we would be using Adobe Flash Builder 4 in a semester-long software engineering class project at a leading university. I had used many Adobe products in the past and was very happy with them, particularly Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver. I had also been wanting to learn ActionScript/Flex, and this project would give me the opportunity. However, after extensive use of Flash Builder, I have realized that this product was the biggest let down since Windows Vista.
There were several people working on the same project using Subversion. In addition, we would have a lab session once a week using different computers, so it was necessary to frequently import projects into Flash Builder. Importing Flex Projects was the most annoying and time consuming aspect of many. Firstly, when one selects the import option, a dialog is presented and is positioned mostly off screen. It is necessary for one to drag the dialog to the screen manually every time. In addition, the path of recent projects is not saved, so one must manually navigate to the proper directory each time. Since there were so many problems with projects falling apart, many imports were necessary. It is necessary to manually navigate through the long hierarchy of directories to reach the project. This is very time consuming and unproductive.
After the import, the project will not run because of some problem finding the HTML files. It was necessary to create new projects from scratch and do a lot of copying/pasting until a team member directed me to delete the html-template directory. I am not sure how he came across this tip, as I had searched the Internet for solutions to no avail. One more tedious step is necessary. The html-template directory needs to be recreated, and the only way, at least that I see, is to rebuild the project, then after the error appears in the Problems window, right-click the error and select Recreate HTML Templates. That’s quite a bit of work, and maybe there should be an explicit option to recreate HTML templates that’s not buried as a right-click option in the errors list.
This leads to the next problem. Errors do not appear in the code until the file is saved. Every time I type in a new statement, it is necessary to save the file in order to see if there are any errors. This is very counterproductive. In addition, it would be much more productive to add a feature in the code hints that would allow for mouse wheel scrolling. It takes much longer to navigate through the hints without this feature.
Another problem related to importing projects is with executing it. Sometimes after importing a new project, a dialog displays that says that it may be necessary to restart the browser. This turned out to be a huge problem, as I frequently have many, many Firefox tabs/windows open at a given time. It is very unproductive to restart Firefox several times until the project finally imports correctly. Sometimes it will work without restarting, however, and I cannot pinpoint any differences between when it works and when it doesn’t. This may be related to the Flash plugin as opposed to Flash Builder.
This leads to another problem. For testing purposes, sometimes it is necessary to locally run the HTML file in the bin-debug directory. Even after a successful import and rebuilding of the HTML template, the Flash content will not load at all – just a blank screen. Sometimes the content will load, but it will not function correctly. If I upload the files to a live web server, it works just fine. However, sometimes it is necessary to run the HTML files locally, and it is very inefficient to have to upload/run to/from a web server.
After all the trial and error of simply importing a project and when you think you’re making progress, something happens to the project along the way. All of a sudden when you try to execute an MXML application, which is in the same directory of several others, only one certain MXML application decides to run (when you are trying to run another one). The only workaround that I found is to either bring up a backup or create a new project and copy/paste the code. This is highly unproductive.
All the inefficiencies and bugs in Flash Builder made it necessary for me to make constant backups. When a project fell apart, I had to open a backup and copy/paste the code. This was a lot of wasted time. In addition, I learned early on not to count on Flash Builder when presenting or making minor, last minute changes before a presentation. Flash Builder always managed to encounter some strange problem.
Flash Builder is unreliable and highly inefficient. I love Adobe products and Flash is great, but at this time I can no longer use or support Flash Builder, and I could in no way justify its purchase in the future until most of these bugs and inefficiencies are fixed. It has potential, and could be a great product if this were the case, but in my experience I spent more time overcoming bugs than coding. When something would not work right, I first had to determine whether it was a bug in my code or a bug in Flash Builder. If Adobe needs an engineer to fix some of these seemingly simple issues, I would be willing to take on the task for the sake of saving this potentially amazing product.

By: Ramon

Ramon — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:16:12 +0000

I have been struggling for quite some time now with the flex framework, I am extremely comfortable with it and was very impressed with it in the beginning when I began learning flex 3 later flex 4. But I must say that as time goes on I am beginning to feel like I have wasted my time in learning it, due to compatability issues with flash player and mac, as well as lack of indexable content for search engines etc….(the list goes on). Not to mention that the FB ide throws a ton of warnings as soon as you begin to get into complex skinning with spark(which I still haven’t gotten to the bottom of).
I love the whole idea and concept of Flex and have wanted to use it so badly, but I am not confident enough with it to make the full switch simply because I am feeling like I am just going to end up with a big headache down the road.

Just out of curiosity, since many of you seem to be a bit more experienced than myself, do any of you feel that Jquery/Javascript libraries would be the smarter way to go giving the direction html5 is heading and adobe’s lack of care for the developer?

By: Jeff Spicer

Jeff Spicer — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:22:32 +0000

Flex 4 is terrible. Try migrating an entire business model based on Flex 3 to Flex 4, including re-training employees and re-creating a code base. Most developers I know who are too busy working to catch a breath don’t even give Flex 4 a second thought. There are a few things in AIR 2.0 that are worthwhile, but for the most part, Flex 4 is “Emperors New Clothes.”

By: Mitesh Dave

Mitesh Dave — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:16:52 +0000

Yes i do agree with most of the people over here that Flex 4 termed as ‘Flash builder 4 ‘ is complicated infact the name itself flash builder 4 leads to ambiguity whether is flex or flash.. i hope adobe realizes the concern of developers

By: Marco Lacava

Marco Lacava — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 18:47:33 +0000

Funny! I googled Flex 4 and not found results, so I tried Flex 4 reviews and found your article. I’d like to post here to show I agree and add some points.
You cannot add in any easy way load an external (generated) CSS file on runtime.
You can group states to change maintain them in a single change. But the Design mode doesn’t support it.
We don’t have yet a decent way to put a HTML inside our application and make them interact (it’s very common since we develop to web :))
We don’t have yet decent support to any method to make an application search engine friendly, when needed (what would make FB4 a very good alternative to AJAX).
While they improved greatly the language Flexibility and Power to make good things, they dismissed the COMMON USE CASE and made the execution of trivial work very expensive to make.
Adobe should really take care and pay attention on your review. I think any analysis of the changes they made in architecture, free of passion, should got the same or very near point.

By: Where’s the Flex Plug-in for Eclipse 3.5? | Down Home Country Coding With Scott Selikoff and Jeanne Boyarsky

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 12:25:42 +0000

[…] Update (September 2010): Since releasing Flash Builder 4, Adobe has updated the Flex Eclipse plug-in to support Eclipse 3.5. Unfortunately, Eclipse 3.6 came out in June 2010 and is currently not supported, so Adobe is already another version behind. Also, I recommend developers stick with Flex 3 for now, as the new version changes a great many things, making it quite difficult to transition to. […]

By: Aaron Steed

Aaron Steed — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 11:58:59 +0000

Flash Builder 4 is worse than Flash Develop.

I have to pay £500 for a product that is worse than a free one.

/facedesk

By: Dan Pride

Dan Pride — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:28:33 +0000

A GREAT THE TIMELY ARTICLE. Stupidly I attempted to stay on the edge by going over to Flash Builder from Flex 3. The complexity is absolutely absurd and a waste of my time. At some point you have to stop learning and start earning. Adobe obviously forgot that and shot everybody in the foot, including themselves. You could spend a month just trying to figureOut FigureOut or figureout what the hell to capitalize and what to camelCase and how and when and where. Do I really want to spend the time to figure out a A from an a ????
At least in Flex 3 you could hit a button, get a lot of relevant code and start to figure it all out. Good luck on this stuff. Thanks for wasting my year Adobe.

By: Scott Selikoff

Scott Selikoff — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:38:59 +0000

@stuffmatters

I don’t disagree that the new Spark components aren’t wonderful things, but overall its not a good sign of a language if, by upgrading, you have to throw out everything that has ever been previously developed in it. It’s what happens when you fork a language.