Adobe Flex 4 Suggestion

Question

It seems that adobe has left out visual design from Flex 4 totally. I understand why the changes to the underlying code. But to cut out designers with no real way of visually designing components is just sucks.  Catalyst  may take care of some of the issues but not all.  If you have to code everything, then you need to give a lot better help and working examples. Am I the only one who thinks Adobe missed this.....

Answer 1

Krueger1 wrote:
But looking to the future, I have to assume steps will be made to make html/ajax so that you don't see all those browser issues, or that it is easy to do a data grid etc.
This is true, and is actually somewhat dealt with already (although not on par with Flex component richness yet).  However a problem that DHTML/AJAX is not likely to ever resolve is the problem of maintainability.  New browsers or updated browsers can break AJAX mock-RIAs.  This requires additional work (in contrast to Flex) where, even if your application requires no updates, there is still a process that needs to be followed. 
AJAX apologists like to reply that "their flavor-of-the-month DHTML library people handle these updates and keep everything working".  But their application has a dependency on that library (which it's maintainers may or may not indefinitely keep up to date), which means a mandatory delay in fixing any problems that come up, and an update of their application to use the new library version if an update was needed.  This is not trivial, as any decent software shop must do the usual test/patch/test cycle each time a browser they want to support has changed.
Anyway, back to the maintenance-light world of Flex (as long as Adobe doesn't get into the habit of constantly deprecating component sets...).  The problem with using Halo (as mentioned in my other thread recently created on the topic) is that Adobe has not, to the best of my knowledge, told us whether it is official deprecated and/or if it will be "going bye bye" at some point in the future.  I have no problem with continuing to use Halo, and may just do that, however at the same time I'd like to know what the fate of the component set is.