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Adobe Releases Flex Builder Linux Alpha
mikepotter writes "Adobe announced Flex Builder Linux Alpha at the Adobe MAX conference today. This is a native Linux port of the Flex Builder IDE (based on Eclipse) for building rich Internet applications. 'Flex Builder Linux is a plugin-only version of the Flex Builder that you can use to build Flex applications on Linux. We wanted to get an early release out with the base Flex Builder features so you could begin to provide us with your feedback and let us know your priorities for additional features.'"
It's an IDE for building apps with Adobe Flex. It was quite apparently to me, even though I've never even considered using Flex. If you don't know what Adobe Flex is, and don't care enough to look it up, why did you bother with the article?
I'll help anyhow:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/
"Adobe® Flex 3 is a cross platform, open source framework for creating rich Internet applications that run identically in all major browsers and operating systems."
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Adobe is giving Drupal some serious loving too, and that's also of interest for the FLOSS CMS folks, no doubt.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/drupal.html
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Adobe Flex is an compelling platform- As I understand, it's Adobe's attempt to bring desktop programming to Flash, using an Eclipse plugin and compiling either to standalone SWFs, or to files generated on the fly with your data.
It's got a few interesting widgets[1], and it's starting to be adopted in more places such as Yahoo's Maps application.
Also worth looking into is OpenLaszlo (http://www.openlaszlo.org/) which is written in a standardized XML language, and compiles to both SWF or DHTML. I've found that there aren't as many people in the community, and documentation is a bit lacking, but being able to compile to multiple runtimes is nice, as is the understanding that if Adobe changes their mind, you can always compile to Silverlight or some other destination down the road.
Both can call Java backends fairly easily, and both are OSS, although OpenLaszlo is far more open.
Also worth investigating is Haxe (Haxe.org), which generates Flash files, and uses it's own custom programming language for both the client and the server.
[1]
http://www.brightworks.com/technology/adobe_flex/components_widgets_etc.html
Colin Davis
Look at Flex as a way for programmers to make Flash applications. The Flash Animator thing (or whatever it was called) is good for Designers and Animators, but hard to work in if you're a traditional programmer.
As such this is a plugin for the Eclipse IDE to maek Flash applications.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Flex builder 3 (currently in beta) will offer most of the missing code intelligence features such as refactoring, and formatting, and will dramatically improve code hinting.
Its actually any browser that supports Flash 9 plugin (which exist for Solaris/Linux/Mac/Windows). I've seen Flex apps run on Firefox/Flash 9 on Solaris for example.
It will probably be the same as for the Windows version:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/
For Flex Builder 2 that's more or less 500 USD (depending on the country you live in).
Their pricing model is sort of similar to what MS is doing with .NET. You can actually get a command-line compiler and build flex apps for free, just like you can compile to .net bytecode for free. What Adobe charges $500 for is the IDE (there is a standalone that's based on Eclipse and an Eclipse plugin). So what you're really paying for is code introspection, code behind, a debugger, and a design view (it seems that the design view doesn't work in the linux version).
There's also an educational version for around $40 and some kind of subscription service similar to microsoft select. You can also get a 30-day trial, which should be enough to get you up to speed on the language, then you could move to the free stuff if you wanted.
Like other client-side technologies, Flex makes liberal use of web services, and that's cool - Another thing you get if you actually buy Flex is something called ColdFusion remoting. This is a way of integrating with Adobe's coldfusion server. You build a SOAP web service in coldfusion, but if you have CF-Remoting then you can talk to that service with a different protocol that SOAP. Supposedly, it's faster because it's not using XML. But you're not locked into it because the service is still available as a standard web service, complete with WSDL and all that. Sounds intriguing. I haven't really checked it out.