Friday, April 27, 2007

Flex open source - Will future flex versions never sync with Flash player releases?

Was wondering, won't future versions of Flex coincide with releases of Flash Player anymore? Coz, if a new version of flex was to depend on a yet to be released Flash player's API, how's adobe gonna handle it?

There are only two ways that I see this being handled:

  1. There will have to be binary builds of flash player required to be released with every internal build being made by the Flash player team. Instead of public beta builds of flash player, there will be daily builds of Flash player ?
  2. Flash plugin will be open sourced as well :P

    Or,

    Flex will always depend on an already released flash player version. Won't that delay the adoption of Flex & the player?

Am sure guys on the flex end have some thoughts in place around this.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think they are already separate...look at Flex 3, that's going to be on Flash 9

Lionel Low said...

Not too sure if I'm answering anything, but I've read the following article at http://www.sauria.com/blog/2007/04/25/adobe-open-sources-flex/.

My understanding was that "the roadmap for Flex will continue to be defined by Adobe". Through their governance model, don't think that we can do "anything" that we what?

Under the "Flex, but Not Flash" section, there's also mention about Flex being open source for 20 months (sadly not for a longer period). So I believe they'll still sync up one day. :P

Well of course, all this are just my noob opinion. Take it from the expert. :)

Arul said...

@Lionel
>> Flex being open source for 20 months

You misread it or the post mentioned it wrong. It meant to say that they were thinking about open sourcing Flex for 20 months now. I don't think adobe or anybody for that matter can open source a product for 20 months and then again make it a closed source product. you kidding me :P ?

Of course they gotta to have an idea about how to tackle it, am just wondering what the answer would be ;o)

Arul said...

@david:

yep, they are separate. History goes that untill Flash 8, flash player release would be synced with the release of Flash authoring product. And for the first time, Flex 2 adopted Flash player ( v 9) and flash player 9 was launched abt 9 months before Flash authoring 9. Now, that was a great move, and Flash authoring adoption will be relatively higher than Flash 8, coz flash player 9 is already available in 84% of PCs around.
Now, I know Flex 3 is gonna target flash player 9 as well. But what abt the versions after that (thats when flex open source release will start to appear)? Will Flash player 10 be released only along with flash authoring? Will Flash authoring and flex release be positioned such that flash player 10 has good penetration before flex is launched?

Just a few questions...

Abdul said...

It takes time to prepare code, setup infrastructure etc for an open-source project.

There is no doubt that it would take a while for someone to become commiter. Quality control and version control are important aspects.

Look at Mozilla projects, how they work...

It's great news and I can imagine more developers using Flex in future..

-abdul

Unknown said...

I read a blog post a month or two ago, by someone who would know, stating rather definitely that future versions of Flex will be targeted at a previously released version of the Flash player.

Not only that, they'll be targeted at a version that's been out long enough to have excellent penetration. I think they may have said 90%+.

For example, the next version will be targeted at 9, which already has 84% penetration, now.

Wish I could remember the source. Anyone know?

In any case, this means that we'll be able to create apps using the latest version of Flex, and deploy them without worrying about this issue.

If I recall correctly they stated or implied that Adobe feels that this is much more important than having their Flex releases use the latest player features.

Anonymous said...

Ted Pactrick answered this question about Flex 3 a little bit ago, it WILL be based on Flash Player 9:
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/01/flex-3-most-important-feature.php