Adobe's Flex 3 technology is popular now because it's new. But that popularity will fade soon as developers start realizing that they want a free IDE to go with their open source technology. Jedit support [1] is so-so and just does not go far enough to make Flex a worthwhile endeavour. Adobe is not towing the mark in comparsion to it's competition.
The Microsoft lesson
Microsoft first tried to push ASP.NET on the developer world as being free. But they soon discovered that ASP.NET would never be popular or grow if there was a dependancy on making a high-end software purchase. Visual Studio .NET was out of the reach of most web developers and so ASP.NET adoption wained. Microsoft left the development of a free IDE [2] for web development in ASP.NET up to a few of its MVPs and employees willing to take on side projects.
Still this was not good enough so finally they had to come out with Visual Studio Express Edition [3]. Things have started to pickup in the .NET world just of late with the release of this software and today Microsoft is starting to gain back some of the lost popularity of Classic ASP. They have also made it apparent that Silverlight will be a contender for the hearts of web developers by making sure Visual Studio Express Edition SP1 beta has support for the up and coming technology.
Adobe needs to open their eyes
What does this all have to do with Adobe? Well Flex is not going to make any break-throughs and will be soon over shadowed by Microsofts Silverlight unless they come out with a free and easy to use IDE. But the competition from Microsoft is not the only thing to worry about. There is also javafx and the free IDE Net Beans. Net Beans [4] is fantastic! It it is one of those IDEs where you cannot believe that it is free. It is also what will propell javafx to a leading position against its competing technologies.
Flex may die on the vine
So while there is plenty of enthusiasm now for Flex it will soon wain as web developers discover that there is too much monetary overhead involved in learning Adobe's "free and open source" Flex platform. Hopefully Adobe will find a free IDE [5] to adopt like Net Beans or Eclipse (uggh!I would hate this but more on that later) or roll their own. I also hope they don't wait two years to make it happen.
Happy Publishing!