Don’t Panic: The Rebranding of Flex Builder
I’m going to throw my hat in the ring here: I think naming Flex Builder as Flash Builder is a good thing overall. Part of the challenge for developers today is that there are now so many interconnecting technologies under the umbrella of the Flash Platform, that some of the naming needs to catch up with technology, and I believe that’s what’s happening here.
The Flash Platform now consists of a technological system comprised of multiple runtimes, tools, frameworks, and languages, so that simple words such as “Flash” and “Flex” no longer suffice to differentiate what we’re talking about anymore. In fact, I personally wrote an entire chapter in our book Professional Flex 3 on describing the Flash Platform and the “Flex ecosystem of technologies” just to clear the matter up.
Personally, associating the word “Flex” with an SDK (consisting of a framework and a compiler), a development tool, a framework and an overall development methodology, in my experience has led to a lot of confusion. Using the word “Flash” generically has also lead to a lot of confusion — is it a runtime, an IDE, the file you run in the browser, or an approach to rich media development? What is Flash? What is Flex?
I think the time has come to drop the generic use of the words “Flash” and “Flex”. Or at the very least, for the sake of tech pundits and journalists who may not have the in-depth knowledge of us designers and developers, to assign the word “Flash” as meaning “the Flash Platform” or “the Flash Player”, and have “Flex” mean either “the Flex framework” or “Flash Platform enterprise/RIA development.” That would be my vote, and how I have come to think of those two words in generic terms.
In rebranding Flex Builder to Flash Builder, what we are seeing here is a move away from using the word “Flex” as describing “enterprise or RIA development in the Adobe technology space” (amongst its other uses) toward using the word to describe simply the Flex framework and associated tools. By moving back toward the use of the term “Flash,” Adobe is slowly rebranding Flex as being a subset of the Flash Platform, not a complete technological ecosystem in and of itself, which on the whole is a lot clearer and more balanced. And I’m all for making things simpler and clearer for clients to understand and adopt the technology.
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