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05.10.07

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Flex Flexing Its Muscle

With the announcement of silverlight and now Sun's JavaFX, it's clear that Microsoft and Sun have serious Flash envy. Figuring out how to capture not just Flash's original designer market but the designer/developer market for Rich Internet Applications is the new holy grail for the software industry.

Meanwhile, after a slow start with Flex 1.0, Flex 2.0 seems to be hitting its stride. Our recent book Programming Flex 2 was our strongest new product release on Amazon in years.

Bonnie Sheehan, our sales rep for Amazon, wrote:

Amazon released backorders from the accumulating pre-orders last week. Not as big as Harry Potter yet but there is hope. ;) The last time we had this excitement was back in March 2005 when Make volume 1 debuted. Before that, it was Programming the Perl DBI back in February 2000, surpassing Grisham at the time which was at the top of the overall best sellers then.

Here's the treemap from our Bookscan data warehouse showing the Web Design and Development area for last week. At least for the week of this new book release, Flex is as large as JavaScript and larger than Ruby on Rails, up 344% over the week before! (Do remember that this graphic shows data from one week only, rather than the quarterly view we normally show. Only time will tell if the momentum continues.)

flextreemap.png

The spike is partly an artifact based on accumulated backorders, but still shows the emerging strength of Flex. Also interesting in this treemap view is the category of Web Content Management, where Drupal and dotnetnuke are making waves, at least according to the book market.

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» Flex metrics? from JD on EP

Flex metrics? Yesterday Tim O'Reilly noted "Our recent book Programming Flex 2 was our strongest new product release on Amazon in years." Ryan Stewart picked up on it too, and it was on Techmeme for awhile. But as Tim noted, strong first week sales of ... Read More

Comments: 6

Anand   [05.10.07 04:21 PM]

The only missing link in the comment is the fact that both silverlight and javaFX have not been released. While Flex has been around to close to 3 years or is it 4?? Probably there is a hype surrounding flex following silverlight release. Nothing much to read in here :)

Angelo Coppola   [05.10.07 04:52 PM]

We were able to do some pretty amazing things with Flex using (and our SDK) to develop some seriously useful charts in our project management app. The process is outlined here:

http://community.axosoft.com/blogs/davidh/archive/2007/04/24/adobe-flex-and-flex-charts-ontime-2007-sdk-sample.aspx

Tom Longson   [05.10.07 05:35 PM]

"Flex is as large as JavaScript"

Flex is *not* as big as JavaScript according to your graph. AJAX is JavaScript, and often these days is used often to refer to "advanced javascript".

JavaScript and AJAX combined still outweigh Flex.

Kevin Curry   [05.10.07 09:04 PM]

"...but still shows the emerging strength of Flex."

You may be a bit loose with language, I think. Your data seem to point to strength of "interest in books about Flex" but not necessarily "strength of Flex." Still, I'm paying attention. Thanks for the info.

Eugene DVD Clarcks   [10.31.07 05:42 AM]

I will keep my finger on the pulse. Thanks for the info, Tim.

haptiK   [10.31.07 07:55 AM]

I wonder if Eugen DVD Clarcks will be keeping his finger on the pulse.?


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