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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Quick Thoughts on Flex and Open Source

Adobe plans to open source Flex, its development framework for building Flash-based web applications this should take effect when they go beta in June with the next Flex version code named Moxie (will be called Flex 3). Adobe is planning to use the Mozilla Public License or MPL. They are still planning to sell their Eclipse-based Flex Builder.

I read on CNet that "the move is also meant to appeal to open-source developers who shun closed-source and proprietary products. Adobe already offers the Flex software development kit for free and provides the source code." Also read on the same article that Jeff Whatcott, vice president for product marketing at Adobe's enterprise and developer business unit said "For some people, (open source) is a philosophical requirement, a sign of integrity and trust in a vendor, this will close that gap and address any lingering doubts they have about our openness and commitment to community."

I am sorry Jeff but this says ABSOLUTELY nothing about Adobe's openness. Flex is as proprietary and as far from open as it gets. Adobe still locks me in when I use Flex whether the source is open or not it doesn't really matter. Only one vendor defined Flex and only one vendor provides runtime for it. In my opinion, open source is not enough. We at Oracle continue to step up our open source contributions but we believe in a much more important source of openness and that is open standards to which we religiously adhere. That's what really gives you the freedom you are looking for as a user. The freedom to switch vendors down the road should you need to. So when we open sourced our reusable user interface components (Apache Trinidad), in addition to opening the source to which the community responded very positively, it was a 100% standards-based contribution (in this case the standard in JavaServer Faces).

I am not trying to take anything away from the success Flex/Flash enjoys it definitely helps build much more interactive web pages and seems to be very popular. I personally block Flash animations on my browser (Firefox) but advertisers like to use flash to make your pages look like fireworks which really annoys me. The way Oracle believes pages should be built is using JavaServer Faces (JSF) components (typically embedded in JSP pages) and if you need richer UI you do that by injecting some Ajax into it. We believe Ajax and JSF go very well together and hold such great promise that we have decided to donate our Rich Client Framework (RCF) to the OSS community. Stay tuned for a bunch of OSS-related announcements in a couple of weeks at JavaOne. Using JDeveloper (100% free), Apache Trinidad or ADF, one can build highly interactive standards-based user interfaces without knowing anything about JSF, JavaScript, XML DOM, CSS, DHTML, etc. Developers are shielded from the complexity of Ajax development… I would like to disclaim that we do support Flash as one of the rendering options for JSF components like charts. You build your JSF-based page and later you could potentially make the decision to render the chart in Flash. Because the JSF component definition is separate from the rendering you can still do that in an elegant way and we support that in ADF Faces as part of the Rich Client Framework.

To make the long story short my point in this entry is the following: Flash is not a bad thing, some people seem to like it and use it quite heavily. But open sourcing it or parts of it (especially the tooling) doesn’t make it open enough for me and the kind of people I talk to in the developer community. They understand very well that openness comes from standards not necessarily from opening the kimono and showing the code even under a friendly license like MPL.

51 Comments:

  • Hi,

    as far as i understand, actionscript is based on ecmascript, which is a standard, isn't it?

    And as far as i understand, java is or was defined by a company, too?!

    By Blogger Unknown, at 12:54 AM  

  • Please See:

    http://blogs.oracle.com/lukekowalski/2006/11/01

    Where Lukke writes:

    "Before we could articulate this question Adobe announced the publication of the Flash Ajax Bridge and their new Flex product. This meant that they were betting on standards, as well as the need for enterprise users to experience the same benefits of rich interactivity and performance currently being enjoyed by consumers."

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4:36 AM  

  • Omar:

    Your comments on Open source and Adobe are very well put. The key issues people should be looking at are:
    1. "Adobe to open source Flex" annoucement is misleading. Not Flex, but only a part of Flex is to be open source (and this is the part that doesn't generate revenue anyway). The revenue generating parts of Flex are not going to be open sourced (see http://www.coachwei.com/blog/_archives/2007/4/26/2907226.html for more info);
    2. "open source or not" itself is only a secondary issue. The biggest issue that people should be looking at is "how many vendors are supporting this thing". A single vendor supported environment, regardless of open source or not, means lock in. Yes, Java was initially defined by one company (Sun), but support for Java is available from BEA, IBM, Oracle, and 300 other vendors. If you built a Java app, you can move from one vendor to another vendor without having to completely rewrite the app. If you want to move from one Ajax framework to another one, you don't have to completely rewrie the app either. However, good luck with Flex/Flash customers on this.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 10:21 AM  

  • Sven,

    Sun has a big influence on Java but I am not sure I fully agree that Sun is the only company defining Java. Have you heard of the Java Community Process (jcp.org). Not the most democratic organization in the world but trust me, it's better than ONE company Adobe/Macromedia defining a technology (Flex).

    By Blogger Omar Tazi, at 4:39 PM  

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