Adobe has told a group of Flex developers, invited to San Francisco for a special reconciliatory summit following the sudden announcement that Flex is moving to the Apache Foundation, that Flash Catalyst will be discontinued. Developer Fabien Nicollet was there and posts:

CS5.5 version of Catalyst is the latest version of Flash Catalyst. It is compatible with Flex 4.5, but compatibility will not be ensured for future versions.

Flash Builder will also have features removed in future versions. Adobe’s slide talks of:

Removing unpopular and expensive to maintain features: Design View, Data Centric Development (DCD) and Flash Catalyst workflows.

The Monocle profiler, shown at the MAX conference as a sneak peek, “continues as a priority”.

The FalconJS project, to compile Flex to HTML5, will be discontinued, though possibly donated to Apache at a date to be determined.

AIR on Linux will not be given to Apache because it would mean sharing the proprietary Flash Player code. This is bad news in the Apache context.

Nicollet concludes:

Flex still has a bright future for companies who want to build fast and robust applications . Not to mention the people who will have a hard time building complex applications on HTML5, for whom Flex will always be a viable and mature alternative.

That is the optimistic view. What is clear from the summit is that Adobe is greatly reducing its investment. I guess we knew this already; but hearing about how Flash Builder will be cut-down, Catalyst discontinued, and so on, will not improve developer confidence.

A lot depends on the progress of the Apache project. My concern here is that since the Flash player, which is the Flex runtime, remains proprietary, this will dampen enthusiasm in the open source community and limit its ability to innovate around Flex.