The Adobe Flex Open Source Hubbub

What is Adobe Flex and why do we care? Flex is a tool we use to develop rich browser-based applications (i.e. “Enterprise Applications”) that run in the Adobe Flash Player. Like many businesses, Flex and the Flash Player have been an integral part of our software ecosystem, and a necessity to build our software. Our flagship product, Savanna, is a multi-source analysis application that is built in Flex.

The Flex SDK is already available to the open source community, but under the control of Adobe, meaning that they solely have the power to actually make any changes to Flex. Now Adobe has officially decided to relinquish this control and send Flex off into the great wide, open source world. You can see the latest news at the Adobe team’s blog.

In order to cement ongoing commitment to Flex in the community, Adobe has a proposal in place with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to guide the future of Flex. Apache has a proven methodology for managing open source projects, where a group of contributors in the community votes on what changes are committed to the Software Development Kit. Now that members of the Flex community will be directly involved in the future development of Flex, we can expect improvements that truly reflect the needs of the developer community.

Ryan, one of our developers said “I believe that we will benefit from Adobe donating to Apache, it will allow the community not only to make suggestions but take part in the updates.”

As the debate on HTML5 versus Flex continues, we can assume there will be plenty of tools for HTML5 development for web applications and new client side application development solutions will be on the horizon. For Thetus, and our installed base, Flex and the Flash Player remain the best client application solution. We’re excited about what is coming to the browser in the next year and what we can do for our customers with these new options.

What would you most like to see in the Apache managed Flex SDK?