Adobe opensources Flex (Exclusive Videos with Adobe)

This is a great first step, but certain important pieces will be held back, including the Flash player and the Eclipse-based Adobe Flex Builder. Governance of the project will remain firmly in the company’s hands. See “Adobe keeps Flash, Flex close to the vest” for more analysis.

Sorry: 615 Diggs. http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source

I +wish+ I had 615 Digger’s under my control. Thanks for the laugh this morning!

http://digg.com/offbeat_news/The_only_person_that_has_ever_been_struck_by_a_particle_accelerator_s_beam
submitted, made popular 5 hours 43 min ago

http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
submitted, made popular 5 hours 23 min ago

This generic link to wikipedia about a guy that stuck his head in a particle accelerator was submitted at the same time and has twice as many diggs.

I agree with everybody who said this isn’t important.
Action script isn’t a real programming language, and I think the responses here highlight that.
I’m still shocked that somebody wrote a commercial compiler with java.

They should make the flash plugin read that XML file instead of the binary .swf.

Besides, they should fast-track this specification through ISO before Microsoft does it.

@63

An Open XML ISO/ANSI described rich media browser format would be excellent. That would truly open the door to having open tools to generate browser content.

What’s going to happen now is that they open sourced the action script “compiler”, but the action script itself is still not a standardized language or intermediate code format.

If somebody else modifies the action script compiler and re-releases a flash movie generator/IDE, Adobe could easily sue them for violating the copyright on their format.

That’s why this announcement is completely and utterly meaningless.

I’m disappointed. From reading Scoble’s earlier post, I thought this would be bigger. But I’m sure those that care will like it.

@57.
Yuri, as you may know, the original wpf/e spec includes the mini-CLR (I still have the PowerPoint presentations ). (For some reason, they said that they would only support C# and VB, which didn’t make sense to me; seems that it would automatically support any language that spit out MSIL (the mini-CLR version of MSIL, anyway).)

They indicated that such functionality would follow the JScript/XAML stuff, but we haven’t heard much about it since then, so I fear it might have been dropped. (Maybe they figured that a mini-CLR would be akin to Java web-applets, which Flash blew out of the water.) I hope not, but I guess we’ll find out next week (I’m sure someone will ask about it at Mix if Microsoft doesn’t say anything about it themselves.)

I can’t keep track..is Adobe also a PodTech “sponsor”?

LayZ: yes, but they didn’t pay for this. I cover a lot of companies that don’t pay anything. They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow.

Does the Wall Street Journal disclose when they write about an advertiser? No, unless they are paying for that coverage. Adobe did not do that here. I’m not compensated to cover one company more than another and would be happy to do this style coverage for Microsoft or Lazlo too, if they want to invite me into their offices and give me exclusive video news the way Adobe did here (or eBay on Monday — eBay is not a PodTech advertiser yet).

By the way, all of our clients are listed right on PodTech.net’s home page. Just visit http://www.podtech.net and see if they have a logo there.

@Mr. Robinson: Yep, first there was a mention of a mini-CLR, then they said it would be dropped for the first release, then they said we’re listening, and now everybody’s saying that we’re goanna get the miniCLR at Mix. I do really hope that happens…

And as for the only C# and VB.NET thing, it’s probably because most other compilers make use of heavy reflection and other complex funtionality that’ll get cut from a miniCLR in no time.

While I have been more the DBA over pure Developer, easy enough to sniff out the Adobe spin-doctoring here.

Obscure low-market share product, “opened up”, attempting to appear bigger than it really is for competitor conference mindshare grabbing, when it’s pretty much a hollow announcement.

Lucky for them, bloggers with video cameras, filming whatever talks and moves. New media infomericalites stung by the spin.

@35 Paul,

I think that it is naive to think that because you dump your code to open source you are going to get a lot of developers, specially for larger companies. Laslo has been open source since its inception.

You mentioned a new breed of applications. I agree that there has been over the last 3-4 years the emergence of new/richer apps but I believe that they will be powered by an evolving HTML, DOM, CSS, Javascript, JSON and XML stack rather than Flex or XAML.

You mentioned SPRY. I think that SPRY is part of the problem. Instead of looking at the existing used/successful/emerging frameworks (and there are a lot of them) and build tooling, management and integration across them, Adobe decided to re-inventing the wheel. As a result they will NOT benefits from the organic evolution of all the other frameworks.

At the end of the day, adoption is the only thing that counts. Adobe (like Microsoft) has enough money to create a tornado when they launch something and everyone knows that in a tornado, even turkeys can fly.

-Edwin

“New media infomericalites”

It would be awesome if some of these very people were forced to take some computer science classes, before they could receive a license to blog.

“New media infomericalites…”

The best description to date of what PodTech does.

@69 “They are not a sponsor of ScobleShow”

Fair enough. But unless you are a wholely own subsidiary of PodTech, I gotta think the money goes into one big pot and ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets

@64, you’re quite wrong there. ActionScript is a fully compliant superset of the EcmaScript 4 standard. You know, the same standard JavaScript is based on?

As for Adobe suing people, one of the stated goals of this move is to allow the creation of 3rd party IDEs. Sounds like you’ve not done very much research on this topic. Perhaps you should.

I love the video! Keep it coming

When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.

Chris: actually I was a computer science major before I switched to Journalism and survived computer classes, and two years of calculus.

>ScobleShow stays afloat one more day from the exposure Adobe gets:

Will you say the same thing next week when I post a Microsoft video?

I’ve posted more than 200 interviews now, only a handful of which come from companies that sponsor us.

@80
“When did the table turn? What I see here are MS fanboys reacting like yesterdays tiresome linux-zealots used to do.”

You misread. Many of those downplaying this Adobe think ARE linux fanboys that hate Microsoft (e.g. Chris of beercosoft.com).

OK wake me up when google can read flash as well as xhtml.