I'm glad that the FD3 community did not waste much time/energy on the myriad of blogs concerning Adobe's decision to 'refocus' and pass Flex over to Apache. I am a bit surprised, however, that the FD3 community did not seem to post [anywhere that I noticed] anything concerning the comparisons/trade-offs as between developing and maintaining Flex/AIR applications and attempting to do the same with HTML-CSS-Javascript or whatever.

In my opinion, just the loss of productivity that I will have by losing the ability to achieve rapid test-turnarounds with this IDE versus anything else, would weigh into my equation on technology/tools for at least 25% of the total cost-benefits analysis. No, I don't think the presentation of those facts would have changed anything, but I think it would have illuminated some of what appears to have been a fairly shallow analysis on the part of the decision makers who opted to prematurely bail out on the continued development of the Flex/AIR tools.

That said, what I am posting for is not spam controversy; I am posting for some solid suggestions as to what the community might recommend going forward, where that euphemism will inevitably mean that I am going to have to go back to some of the tools that I used a decade ago. I can't tell yet whether it is time to revisit Java, give a hard look at C# or even move over to XCode. What I can say, appertaining to my knowing how important a productive IDE is in making any such decision, is that I would like to bring FD3 along for a ride. Or, failing that, I would like suggestions from Phillipe, Mika, et. al., on alternatives.

I have always eschewed the MS tools, mostly because of their non-support of openness, but also because of price. Seeing, however, what you have done with .NET tools, I wonder if I should be looking at your sister-site, MonoDevelop? I, of course, know about Eclipse, and its broad, solid support, but I never found it as nimble as FD3. Indeed, I more readily relapse to VIM and ANT if, for some reason I can't work in FD3.

Any suggestions appreciated. It's going to be hard enough to replace years of building up utility libraries and work-processing flows no matter where I have to go. Learning Yet Another IDE will make it just that much less enjoyable.

FD4 actually supports haxe language (haxe.org) which lets you code in almost-AS3 and compile into Javascript (haxejs.org) or native games using a Flash-like API (haxenme.org).
There's also Jangaroo (which can be integrated in FD too) to "compile" AS3 code to JS too.

Targeting JS using either haxe or Jangaroo opens some great opportunities:
- ExtJS is the closest Flex-like HTML framework alternative for RIA development, Jangaroo has some ExtJS examples and even a MXML-like markup for ExtJS,
- you may want to try Appcelerator Titanium which lets you build apps for both desktop (as HTML5) and mobile (as native UIs). There are haxe "externs" for both desktop and mobile (search github),
- also check PhoneGap to package HTML5 mobile apps.

Thanks for the thoughtful suggestions. I have flittered around haxe without ever really understanding where is it positioned.

Over the weekend I groaned while seeing what you have to do to get a JavaFX application going with NetBeans. The API will look familiar to anyone using the AIR/Flex SDKs, but there is nothing approaching the rapid code/test/change/re-test cycle you achieve with fcsh.

For what it's worth, haxe compiler is *much* faster than fcsh.