Just Say No to Fx Prefixing!

This week the Flex team is debating a key issue for the future of Flex and they’re asking for input from the community (that’s you!). The debate is whether components in the next version of Flex should all start with the letters “Fx” or use namespaces to resolve possible conflicts with legacy components like Button, Panel and ScrollBar. Can you guess what I think?

There are a few things that really, really bug me about all this. The first is how simple it should be. There is a single correct answer to this problem and it’s namespaces. Namespaces and packages are the standard, well defined, commonly accepted solution for this exact problem. The people behind Flex are smart guys and girls and they know that, but somehow we ended up here anyways. Why is this even a debate?! The answer is, I speculate, because the shortcut (Fx prefixing) was faster. It fit within Adobe’s timeframe and/or allowed them to include more features in the next release. To say it another way, the ARCHITECTURE REVIEW BOARD passed measures which every member knew went against W3C, OOP, and even Flex’s own pre-existing standards so that they could put more features in the next release – and that scares the hell out of me.

The second item which, again, really bugs me is how it was handled. Somewhere along the path of building Flex 4 this issue came up and was debated, at length, behind closed doors at Adobe with, perhaps, a lot of speculation thrown in about how developers would actually respond. For the record, the answer is that we would respond poorly. Now, that’s not actually a new process or anything, and I should point out that it’s happened with all kinds of other decision that we’ve been perfectly happy with. However, when the verdict for this decision was rolled out and the community had a chance to respond with an appropriate “WTF?”, the response from Adobe was increasingly poor. This decision was a done deal, development for it was complete, scoping for new features in this release was done. After years of evangelizing to make sure this technology was more than just a job to us, we were helpless to see it falter. In reality Adobe does and should have that right, but it still scares the hell out of me – and the fact that I have to rationalize how unimportant this is against the reality of what’s important in life – that should really scare the hell out of Adobe. The disenfranchisement of your core audience is Not a good prospect.

… but there may be hope. Last week Adobe reopened discussions concerning the topic and promised to reconsider the issue. I’m urging Adobe to simply value the opinions of it’s developer community. Please, if you want to have a say in the matter make sure your voice is heard soon. They plan to make a decision as early as tomorrow!

Updated 02/13/2009 Kittens saved, Fx prefix will go away!. Thank you Adobe! My faith is restored and you may evangelize me once more.

13 Responses to “Just Say No to Fx Prefixing!”

  1. Jun Heider says:
    February 12, 2009 at 4:12 pm

    Ben,

    Not only is that a bad-ass kitten pic but I’m definitely on your side when it comes with the horrible decision to Fx prefix. I’ll hop onto the forum and chime in but thanks for being our voice during these turbulent gumbo times!

  2. David Bigelow says:
    February 12, 2009 at 5:13 pm

    Ben -

    Totally agree – NICE VISUAL!!!!

    Dave

  3. ryan says:
    February 12, 2009 at 6:39 pm

    ‘fxButton’ reminds me of those nightmare flash5 days like ‘some_mc._x’… its obsurd because it is in complete contradiction to the flex coding standard guidelines…

    namespaces are there to be made use of… u got my vote dude…

  4. return undefined; » Fx prefix - Help Adobe make the right decision says:
    February 12, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    [...] don’t have to look hard to know that the community overwhelmingly hates Adobe’s proposed decision to prefix the name of new components with Fx. [...]

  5. Jay Araujo says:
    February 12, 2009 at 8:09 pm

    Thank you so much for this piece.

    I posted a link on Flexcoders to this post as well as Manish Jethani’s post on the same subject.

    Cheers from Brazil.

  6. Arul Prasad says:
    February 12, 2009 at 10:26 pm

    Left a message on the forum’s discussion thread already.
    Almost all developers responding there seem to be favoring the idea of having multiple namespaces, instead of the prefix. Hope adobe listens.. The idea of Fx prefix making it easier for newbies seems to be so much more valued than making the language itself better. Wonder why…

    The Fk! logo is damn funny!

    Cheers!

  7. Andrew Westberg says:
    February 13, 2009 at 6:35 am

    I put my comments on the Adobe Forum thread earlier. Couldn’t agree more. Let’s SAVE THE KITTENS!!!

  8. Tink says:
    February 13, 2009 at 7:58 am

    Although it’s extremely sad that Adobe came up with the Fx prefix as a solution, and it has took a lot of noise for the to reopen the issue, you have to give em props for listening (even if it was late in the day).

    Fuck kittens, but please lets not have the Fx prefix Adobe!

  9. TK says:
    February 13, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    NO!

    There, I said it. :)

  10. Arul Prasad says:
    February 13, 2009 at 1:42 pm

    Mission accomplished. Kittens saved!

    http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b7e849?@844.Encli2HYZV3@

    Cheers to all who chimed in!

  11. Jay says:
    February 16, 2009 at 2:52 am

    To Matt’s credit, he did promise me back in October that he’d not slaughter any kittens if popular opinion was unfavorable:

    http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b6e2ed/0

    Thanks Ben!

  12. Mike Orth says:
    March 17, 2009 at 9:07 am

    That Fk! logo is freakin awesome!

  13. Ben Stucki » Flex 4 Namespaces and the Boy Who Cried EPIC FAIL! says:
    May 29, 2009 at 9:16 am

    [...] few months ago I posted about being strongly adamantly against the use of Fx Prefixes in the Flex 4 SDK. In fact I probably went a little overboard – but holy crap, kittens lives were [...]