Q&A: Ted Patrick, head of dev relations at Sencha

Back in November, Adobe made a snap decision to open-source Flex, its SDK for Flash-based web apps. The whole stack was donated to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), where it was accepted at the end of December and now sits in the incubator as a podling. Combined with Adobe’s earlier announcement of its broader intentions to move away from mobile Flash, the move sparked debate about Flex’s future. While ‘Apache Flex’ currently boasts a relatively active community of developers and was recently graced with a shiny new logo, the platform’s long-term status is far from clear.

One firm that has laid its cards on the table is Sencha. Having lost James Pearce, its head of developer relations, at the beginning of December, the company quickly snapped up Ted Patrick as a replacement. A former Flex evangelist at Adobe, Patrick appears to have been fully converted to Sencha’s HTML/JavaScript cause -- writing in a blog post last Tuesday, he laid out the details of a new fast-track programme to woo Flex devs over to HTML5, including a three-month roadshow across North America and Europe and a personal webinar on Valentine’s Day.

Trailed on the Sencha website since late-January, the programme has caused a predictable storm of outrage among the Apache Flex community. When prominent Flex developer Jeffry Houser pointed out a number of inaccuracies in one of Sencha’s explanatory PDFs, Patrick was forced to wade into the project’s internal mailing list and apologise, emphasising that he wanted to avoid “confusion, defensiveness and conspiracy theories”. So what will Sencha’s programme actually be about? We caught up with Patrick to find out.

webdev360.com: We reported on Flex's acceptance into the Apache incubator back in January. Do you think that the platform will continue to be actively developed in the coming months and years, or will it die out relatively quickly? Was Adobe's jettisoning the project, and the broader move away from mobile Flash, really its death knell?

Ted Patrick: Having worked at Adobe on Flex, I have a deep respect for the technology and the ecosystem around Flex. Flex is great technology and the activity at Apache Flex and Spoon are fantastic changes for the Flex developer community. The most important issue for Apache Flex is the dependency on Flash Player as a foundational technology. With both Apple's iOS and Microsoft's Windows 8 (ARM) blocking the use of plugins, I feel that HTML5 is ideally suited for deployment of applications to both desktop and devices moving forward. There is nothing wrong with Flex as a technology but the market is now actively investing and moving towards a foundation built on HTML5.

WD360: Do you envisage the audience for your webinar and Sencha's training days using the technologies side-by-side, or are you gunning for complete switch-overs?

TP: Flex developers have an ideal skill set and existing knowledge for development of HTML5 applications with Sencha frameworks. We want Flex developers to see the market opportunity of HTML5 applications and realise that they can deliver great application experiences with Sencha frameworks. We are seeing many of the top Flex consulting firms learning Sencha frameworks to expand their core competency to include HTML5 applications. Additionally we are seeing many large enterprise customers choose Sencha to replace and augment existing Flex applications.

At Sencha, we are building professional frameworks and tools to enable HTML5 applications. We are laser focused on creating the next great platform for application developers and we are actively investing to make that a reality. Today Sencha is a profitable company and top venture firms have invested in the company's future. I really believe in what we are building at Sencha and the opportunity ahead of the company could not be better.

WD360: How exactly do you plan to woo Flex devs in your Valentine's Day webinar? What will it cover and what is it going to add to simply reading up on the documentation and hacking away?

TP: The Flex to Sencha Webinar will introduce Sencha's frameworks and development model to Flex developers. While the syntax of Flex and Sencha are different, they are very similar in terms of developer paradigms and framework purpose. Sencha frameworks are object-oriented, component-based, and are professionally engineered for application development. Sencha frameworks are built with JavaScript but add an advanced class system supporting inheritance, packages, mixins, and runtime class loading. Combined with the class system, a proven standards library, and a modern API, the developer language experience in JavaScript is very similar to ActionScript. Additionally we are building tools and services that make application development productive while supporting developer best practices and we are adding support for AMF/Blaze remoting directly to JavaScript to support existing application backend technology.

With over 2,000 developers registered for the Flex to Sencha Webinar, I am looking forward to introducing Sencha's frameworks to the Flex developer ecosystem.