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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.'"
I read what passes as an article here and it doesn't explain what Flex Builder is. And the summary didn't help with it trying to get as many flexes in as it possibly could. What is Flex Builder?
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
knowing adobe i have to ask "whats the price?"
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.
good- another company that realizes that linux adoption is inevitable.
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
Flex may be, but the Flex builder is not. At least, version 2 wasn't.
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
So yeah, expect to pay for the IDE if you get the official one.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
If they are using eclipse then why do they ship a binary installer? Why not use the Eclipse feature installation system or even a archive that contains the feature/plugin stuff. It's not that difficult. Nobody cares for flashy installers.
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.
So I can assume that this application generates 100% valid HTML and XHTML constructs, with their own proprietary Flash being an additional extension to that baseline, riiiiiight?
Flash is:
And this message goes to all of those "web developers" who use Flash in their websites.. please use HTML to deliver the Flash, not the reverse.
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.
- Open source (BSD license)
- Free as in beer.
- Free as in liberty.
- Great UI composer
- Built for web service integration
- Lots of nifty online tutorial videos
- Eats its own dogfood: It runs in the browser! (No Java, no activeX,
no flying pig aka Eclipse, just DHTML)
- And.. (drumroll, please) NO FLASH!
I've only been kicking it around for a few weeks, but its a fantastic tool. The learning curve is a bit steep, but now that I got my head around it, I'm not looking anywhere else.007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
Lately Adobe has been labeling many of their products, especially frameworks related to web development as "open source" when in reality they open source a small part of it and leave the critical portions under an extremely restrictive proprietary license.
As I understand it they have claimed they will open source parts of the flex sdk, but the flex ide, and the flash runtime plugins will still remain under the same old proprietary license, this is not acceptable. It would be a step backwards if in a few years a significant portion of content on the internet was trapped in proprietary binaries that are difficult to index and likely impossible for many to use a few years down the road. Adobe releases some specs for flash but they are released under terms saying that if you read the specs you are forbidden from writing anything capable of working with flash files. This is almost worse than nothing because even if you create a flash plugin completely independently or with the use of clean room techniques Adobe has the option of claiming that you must have looked at their specs and take you to court in an attempt to kill your project. Also there are many restrictions on the use of the plugin itself, for example you can't use it in many commercial applications such as a flash driven kiosk without first paying Adobe again.
How many years did Linux languish with outdated and extremely buggy versions of the flash plugins? We may have a more or less up to date version of the plugin now but there is no guarantee it will stay that way, a great deal of internet content is trapped in a format that we can only view as long as Adobe feels like letting us, and the architecture support is still pathetic, how is it there is still no native x86-64 support? This should have been done two years ago, to make no mention of the lack of flash9 support on the smaller architectures such as powerpc which effectively locks ps3 users out of browsing most modern flash based websites.
Adobe seems like a big heavy software company that still operates primarily in a 1980's mentality, trying to make the transition to something more modern and web-centric , and they are trying to get some of the glow of open standards and open source to rub off on them, the problem is that they seem to be faking much of it. They talk about openness to get you interested, then you dig into it and find out that there are always critical components they are still keeping under lock and key. I am no fan of flash but it does have its uses, I keep hoping that pressure from Microsoft's silverlight will cause Adobe to really open up the flash spec and allow 3rd parties to create their own implementations of the flash ide and flash runtimes, as pressure from Microsoft's half-assed pdf alternative caused Adobe to release pdf as an iso standard. Though I see no sign of this happening as Adobe still seems to believe they can have their cake and eat it too.