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.'"

Comments

Re:I read "TFA" and I don't get it

[Aladrin]

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."

Eclipse ain't all the Adobe FLOSS lovin'...

[SpzToid]

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

Flex versus Open Laszlo

[E1ven]

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

Not open source, though.

[TuringTest]

For those of you with memories, this is related (but not equal) to previous announcement by Adobe to open source the Flex engine. As explicitly stated then, though:

Adobe Flex Builder, the Eclipse-based IDE, is not part of the open source announcement. Adobe Flex Builder for Linux is published under a standard restrictive license.