Even though I've pretty much given up on Adobe's Spry Framework, I noticed yesterday that some major updates have been added in, primary among them the introduction of Spry UI.  According to the Spry Team's blog post, Spry UI is a new way of approaching Spry widgets that moves away from the previous (and kind of annoying) necessity of following a prescribed markup model and now attempts to work with user-defined patterns.  This *should* allow for much more flexibility and customizability, and allow for much more robust opportunities for skinning that were previously possible.  Moreover, because all the widgets will now inherit from the same shared base classes, the door is widened for Spry to become a much more robust framework in the future.

Does the introduction of Spry UI mean that Spry development is alive and well, and that Adobe is committed to making something of it long term?  Only time will tell. 

The problem for me, of course, is that time is precisely the problem.  Development of the framework has been seemingly eternal, and significant updates (whether features or simply information about ongoing development) are VERY infrequent.  While I see a lot of promise in what Spry can do (and can become), "facts on the ground" force me to use other, more mature frameworks for serious development.  

I don't mean this as a slight to Spry, nor to the talented Spry team (or even the thousands of developers who make really good use of it).  The bottom line for me is that I need a framework today that has the fully formed features of a jQuery or Ext.  If Spry Framework is in that position tomorrow, I'll more than happily give it a another chance.