Adobe Open sources Flex – Who Cares?

Yesterday, Adobe announced they are open sourcing Flex, their all wiz bang Flash based web application builder. This seems to stem from their concern about Microsoft Silverlight/WPF/WP or whatever they are calling it today. This looks to be a Adobe’s last ditch effort to save Flash aka to Sun open sourcing Java. There is a reason Flex has never taken off, Adobe sucks at writing tools & programming languages/API for developers. Macromedia was bad (see Actionscript), Adobe is worse. Some companies can compete with Microsoft in terms of IDE & programming languages (Borland does a decent job) but Adobe is not one of them. Not to mention their Eclipse based IDE is not part of the open source release.

Most Flex/Flash users are designers in nature that want to go further so they pick up action script for a programming language on the side. Now you want these people to tear into some Java code? This could get ugly real fast. I’m not saying Silverlight/WPF/WP is going to be the end all, but sorry Adobe who cares?


Trying to write your own Java or Flash code? It might be easier to start with custom PHP/Perl script writing. Writing code can be tricky if you’ve never attempted it before, so look at free PHP scripts online first. Custom web programming is great if you can pull it off.

Tim

A .NET, PHP, Marketing Guru authority, at least I hope I am. Reach me at tboland@gmail.com

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