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Adobe Releases Flex Builder Linux Alpha

Posted by kdawson on from the joining-the-party dept.

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.'"

1 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Flex versus Open Laszlo by E1ven · · Score: 5, Informative

    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