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June 29, 2006
Why open source developers can be excited about Flex
The goal of open source software has always been to create software that can be free, not in price but in terms of restrictions for use. The availability of source code and the the ability to modify that source code, are important parts in the free / open source software movement.
There is lots of good news with respect to today's Flex launch for open source developers. First of all, the free Flex SDK includes the source code for the Flex components, and allows anyone to compile a Flex application at no cost. You are free to modify the Flex components as you need to. As a developer, you can now build a Flash application in VIM, run it through the compiler in the SDK, which works on Linux and Mac OS X, and build a .swf file. (In fact, if you're using VIM, you might want to check out actionscript.vim by Manish Jethani to highlight your ActionScript source code in VIM). For debugging, you can use fdb, part of the Flex SDK.
The Flex Builder tool is built on top of Eclipse, and we have published the source code for Flex Builder that is derived from Eclipse.
You can create open source Flex applications, and host them over at osflash.org. As a Flex developer, you can enable users to see your source code when they right click on your application ("View Source"). (To enable this, in Flex Builder, choose Project -> Publish Application Source...).
You Flex application will work well with a Java backend system or PHP backend system. For PHP integration, you'll want to download and use the open soure project AMFPHP. You can read my tutorials on how to integrate Flex and PHP on the Flex Developer Center.
Once you've built your application, you can then deploy the file as you would any other web application (likely to an Apache web server), and end users can interact with that application using the free Flash player. Now, the story would be much better if that Flash player was available on Linux (and if it were open source), but its not, at least not yet (available on Linux that is). However, there is a team of talented engineers working on Flash Player for Linux, and you can follow their progress on their blog. Apparently a beta version of Flash Player 9 for MacTel machines should be out soon, with a beta for Linux sometime later this year.
One of the benefits to web applications for Linux enthousiasts has always been the fact that web applications are not tied to a specific operating system - they simply need a web browser to work. The main problem to this model has been the the client: web applications today cannot replace desktop applications, there are too many limitations: local file access, no vector drawing APIs native in the browser, rich media integration isn't supported, JavaScript execution speed isn't the same as compiled code... Flex applications solve most of these problems (a drawing API is available in the Flash player, it can integrate rich media content easily, and it now has a JIT compiler for better performance), and we hope to have a better solution for local file access when we release Apollo (a beta version is expected later this year).
The development of more advanced web applications will continue to help adoption of operating sytems where the Flash Player is available, including Linux. And yes, some developers are working on an open source Flash player.
No, the story isn't perfect, but I think its pretty good. The Flex SDK includes the source code to Flex components, you can build and debug Flex applications on Linux, those applications can interact with an open source backend system (PHP), and end users can interact with those applications at no cost (and in a little while on a free operating system).
BTW: I'm always interested in your feedback on how Adobe can contribute to the open source community.
technorati tags:opensource, php, adobe, ria, flex, web2.0, flash, eclipse, flexbuilder
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Comments
IMHO, Adobe (read MM) has realized how good it can be to involve users in their product's development. We developers feels excited when we are given a cool tool to work with, but we are even more when we ARE part of the tool.
Is there any guidance on how this fits with LiveCycle or why anyone would choose either? My impression is that Flex is promoted widely to developers at low prices or free at a starter level. LiveCycle remains very expensive and is promoted only to large oranisations as far as i can tell in the UK. What about something like fpdf?
http://www.fpdf.org/
This is like a starter level for PDF creation from data, but i don't hear much about open source in the PDF context.
How will this all fit together?
I really enjoyed your interview on php|architect! I posted a short summary for my site's visitors. Keep up the great work at Adobe!
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