LCCS , no longer a going concern?

[TVonthemob]

So I have a project I have been working on for a few months, wrapping my head around Flex to get to LCCS because I felt the price was right and the capabilities were strong.  I have been sensing blood in the water over this with the recent Flash/Flex changes , but SDK's have been rolling along.  So I called my sales to guy to inquire about the mobile LCCS sdk / switching to commercial service as I want to deploy some stuff outside.   Since mobile is the target of my work really.  I have been told as of tonight that the actual mobile sdk is not going to be released.  Nigel is gone, which doesnt sound promising for the whole concept.  They have replaced him so I am sure there are steady hands at the wheel, but man I feel like I have wasted a few months.  Anyone else have any better information?  I hope we can ask nicely enough that they keep this stuff in development and extend it to mobile.  Greedily, I just want webcamera , audiosubscriber, audiopublisher, maybe shared whiteboard but I could be happy without it.  I actually would be happy if they just gave me some detailed samples to extend the non optimized version with microphone classes. I want to 4.6 to extend the torch on the device hopefully with a native extension.

[Adobe_ejs]

Hi Guys,

Me again.  Adobe is not completely pulling support for Flash.  I don't work on the Flash platform team, so I won't speak for them.

Have you seen this post which describes our plans for Flash - http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplatform/2011/11/flash-to-focus-on-pc-browsing-and-mobile-apps-adobe-to-...

Jeff

[adam_k]

thanks for the continued responses jeff, i don't doubt you have a tough job right now weathering shitstorm after shitstorm from customers big and small. i recognize you're only the messenger here and not the executor so these comments are not directed at you per se, but rather i'm making them in hopes that this sentiment will trickle back up to the higher levels of adobe.

i've been basing my business for years on adobe technology and selling my clients on it as well. the past few months have been a PR nightmare. i realize that LCCS is a small fraction of LiveCycle in general so adobe might not care about it's continued development.

but what i and many, many others are watching very carefully is how adobe deals with supporting customers of LCCS after the fact. adobe is talking big about shifting to an html5 focus and that's great, but if they just abandon support for things like LCCS there is no chance in hell i will ever base my business on future adobe technologies and i will push my clients as far away from adobe technology as i can. the trust is broken in a fundamental way and regaining it will not happen even if adobe releases an amazing html5 development tool in the future. regaining that trust can only happen in the immediate future and it hangs precisely on how well adobe supports its developer base in the coming months during this transitional period.

although LCCS is small potatoes compared to adobe's services at large, it is representative of adobe's reliability in the long term.

rant over. please open source LCCS or at least license the source so we can continue to run our services.

thanks for listening

adam

[BartoszMar]

I absolutely agree with Adam. It is given and nothing new that technologies change and companies adjust to these changes as must customers. However, the way Adobe handles this change and support to customers is not acceptable. I have been using different technologies in my development years and I have been dealing with Flex and LCCS only for the last year but after experience with LCCS, I will never base any development efforts on Adobe's development tools for future development projects. It is not possible to depend on Adobe's support. I think most developers will feel the same and try to stay as far as possible from Adobe's programming tools. I am sure the message will spread among development community. 

[Former Community Member]

Thanks for the above update Jeff!  It is good to hear that Adobe isn't abandoning Flash completely, however, I must say that I agree with adam+k and BartoszMar.  This is not going to sit well with many people, even if we have to move to an FMS solution on our own.  Could it not be possible to keep LCCS up for the time being.  The API is almost perfect and wouldn't need much support.  Perhaps you could keep a couple of engineers around (Arun would be my first choice) to maintain the server and do small fixes?  Is this really too much to ask?  Real time p2p video collaboration technology is not going away and will only grow with time.  Taking LCCS away only moves everything back 3 years!

Thanks again for your time,

Matt