OK, so Macromedia have officially released Flex. I would be excited, but unfortunately it’s targeted (and priced) at a way higher level than anything I’m likely to be involved in for quite a while. Too bad for me, right? Scott Barnes sums it up well.
So why is everyone so surprised? Macromedia have been saying it’s an enterprise-level product for ages, right? Sure they said it, but did anyone actually hear? I applied for the beta, and all I actually heard was “Flash without the IDE”. Macromedia make products that developers like me can afford. Enterprise, yeah yeah, like ColdFusion is Enterprise. Only guess what… ColdFusion is not Enterprise. Apparently, even ColdFusion Enterprise is only half as Enterprise as Flex. Which is where the problem lies. US 12K is starting to make the Flash IDE look less horrible.
Luckily, there’s light at the end of this particular tunnel (the tunnel leading far, far away from the Flash timeline). Laszlo Presentation Server is not, by all accounts, as mature and developed a product as Flex. But, it’s hard to knock the price — it has a small business/single CPU licence for US $2K. That’s a little more like it! I’ve heard that the file size is quite horrible. I haven’t had time to check it out for myself yet. But they’re both version 1 products… I almost wanna give Laszlo Systems my US $2K just for being reasonable! Imagine what version 2 could achieve…
Another note, as far as I can tell, Laszlo Systems released pricing for their small business licence after Macromedia announced pricing to the Flex beta testers. Whether this is purely coincidental or a brilliant marketing move, given the beta testers’ panicked squeals at the Flex pricing, I’m not going to speculate. But they certainly seem to be listening to the market. You gotta love that.
Edit: Apparently Laszlo is not a version 1 product, it’s at version 2.1.1 — whatever. As everyone keeps saying, it’s not as mature as Flex. But it’s a sixth of the price. Hard to ignore.