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Adobe: Flex for All, and (It Hopes) All for Flex


Rich Internet application framework being released as open source toward year’s end

By David Rubinstein
May 15, 2007 — 
Flex for all. That’s what Adobe Systems is hoping for with last month’s announcement that the rich Internet application framework is being released as open source software.

Jeff Whatcott, vice president of product marketing, said the release will be made toward the end of the year, in conjunction with the readiness of Flex 3, now code-named Moxie. The software will be released under the Mozilla Public License, which Whatcott said was chosen because it’s friendly both to open source and to commercial OEM customers.

He said that in June, the company will post public daily builds “instead of the usual beta process,” and a public bug database will be created and functioning. “It’ll look like the open source project, but we just won’t be able to accept any code [from contributors] at that point,” he said.

Adobe is releasing the Flex SDK, framework, compiler and some utilities in the hopes of driving Flex adoption, so the company can broaden the market for its FlexBuilder IDE and the Flex Data Services server, which it will continue to sell. Whatcott said developers could continue to work in the tool of their choice—be it Notepad, IntelliJ or Eclipse, for example—to create rich Internet applications, which can stream in audio and video and update data fields without having to page-refresh with every request.

Other benefits to Adobe are that more people will be coming to the Flex table with ideas, features and code, and the open source contributors can make the application more bulletproof to protect against attacks or even unwitting mistakes that could jeopardize the application.

With the open source Flex software, users will be able to create binary SWFs [a proprietary Adobe file format] that can be served up by any Web server, giving developers the opportunity to test-drive Flex and its MXML markup language, he said. “We can only sell to people who have adopted Flex technology,” Whatcott said.

‘NOT ONE SIZE FITS ALL’
With the rise of AJAX and Microsoft’s announcement of its Silverlight cross-platform runtime, Whatcott noted that “it’s not one size fits all. The market for rich Internet applications has exploded in the last 18 months. Everyone’s talking about better user experiences.”

He did say he was puzzled by Microsoft, which he said did not take a holistic approach to richer applications with Silverlight. “They’re doing what they need to do to have a story in the marketplace,” Whatcott said. “They’re simply trying to drive more people to Windows. We take a different approach, and this open source strategy makes that clear. We’re not about any particular operating system.”


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