February 8, 2007
A few weeks back Yakov Fain on his flexblog took a guess on “How many Flex developers are there?” and estimated the number to be around 70000 plus …
… people who instead of screaming on the net “Flex is cool†are quietly studying Flex in vocational schools in Bangalore suburbs. They are not registering themselves on Flex forums …
The estimate is quite reasonable but I feel that there aren’t many such people who are learning/working on Flex but who don’t have a presence in the Flex virtual world (as blog readers/writers or discussion forum participants). I base this on the fact that the offline resources for learning Flex (mainly Books and Training) are still very scarce. I cannot comment on the rest of the world but here in Bangalore none of the popular bookstores have any Flex books available, most of them don’t even have Flex listed as a topic in their databases. From a quick search on Google i found that there are a few Adobe training partners that provide training in Flex but their number is also very limited.
Having stated the above let me try and estimate “how many Flex developers are there in India” …
Abdul Qabiz recently compiled a list of Flex resources in india. As I only plan on using the discussion groups for my estimate, his list is pretty much exhaustive barring the Adobe Flex community on Orkut.
The number of members on each of these groups is as follows:
- iGeeks: 364
- RIA-India yahoo group: 174
- Flex India google group: 43
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- Adobe Flex Community on Orkut: 267
Total: 880
Lets divide this total by 2 assuming that only half of this total are unique people, that makes the figure 440. Now keeping my views above in perspective, lets assume that this figure is 20% of the number of flex developers in India … I feel that there are about 2200 Flex developers in India.
February 5, 2007
In February of 2005 Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX in an Adaptive Path Essay and the way we perceive the Internet has changed ever since. Users are demanding and developers are providing more and more desktop like functionality in web sites, so much so that the very concept of web “pages” seems to be loosing significance. We are now experiencing the evolution of a new class of Internet based applications where a user’s experience is finally an equal to functionality, Rich Internet Applications are the talk of the day and that is what this weblog is all about.
“Rags to Riches” is a journal of my experiences as I observe and contribute to the evolution of a Richer Internet, an Internet where applications are more engaging, interactive and intuitive. There are a host of technologies aiding this evolution … AJAX helped in setting the stage, Adobe’s Flex, Microsoft’s WPF/E and others are taking the march forward.
Flex is my personal choice of technology for making RIAs, I’m going to keep the details of why I like Flex for a future article but in short I believe that if used properly it is the best solution available(as of now) for making RIAs. I started playing with Flex around the release of Flex 2 i.e. mid 2006 and there has been no looking back ever since. In December 2006, I left my Java development position in EMC for a Flex centered position with SAP Labs and things have never been so good. I am currently involved in some very cool Flex development and I would be sharing whatever I can on this blog. I enjoy developing flex components and I plan on sharing some of them as well in this space.
It is my birthday tomorrow and as I start a new year of my life, I am very excited about this technological evolution that I’m a part of and hope to talk a lot about it on this blog.
