I was taking a look through the logs for Feed-Squirrel today and noticed something new. Back when the site was launched early last year, the CF category was by far and away the most popular category on the site.
Now it seems Flex has taken this mantle, and even Flash has moved up into second position. So, considering the buzz around CF8, it would appear CF interest is now lower than that of the Flash Platform (admittedly with help from Apollo, Flex 3 and Flash CS3 news).


Flex, Ajax etc. are new technologies and I think talking about a new stuff a lot is normal.
Well think about it for a bit. CF is one of X server side technologies. Where as you really only have Flash(Flex, OpenLazslo) or Ajax for front-end (I’ll ignore Silverlight and Java).
Adobe isn’t trying to win the server technology side of things (that is too fragmented), however Flash/Flex + Air has a very good chance of becoming the standard RIA client development platform.
The flexcoders mail list is the busiest mail list I’m on.
What is very good (from an adoption point of view) is that Ebay are developing an AIR client. Not sure if Adobe and Google are partnering on projects as well.
I personally think Air + Flex will change my career path.
Stunning work Adobe.
All of these new trends are more boated than Lisp ever was…and the stuff in the current lisp world (cmucl, sbcl, clisp) all start up likety-split. They are still going after all these years…
Ruby/Rails is bloated as hell. And it doesn’t even handle multithreading yet–you have these thin implementations that consume all these resources per-instance. Very disappointed.
Python crowd is making useless observations and syntax changes such as “my_var = value if condition else other_value” — big friggen deal– saw that this morning and renewed by intention to go back to lisp.
For food, I’ll code in PHP and Javascript. And Java when I have to. Another bloated overengineered pile of crap. I just don’t care what weird syntactic thing is of concern to pythonists any more. And Ruby…what bloat, unbelievable. Just do it in PHP.
Flex/Air? Huh? Who really needs it?
Best regards,
-R