Adobe Flex SDK bombshell STUNS developers Adobe is to hand over its Flex SDK, which lets you develop applications for the Flash runtime using XML and ActionScript code, to an open source foundation. The company is committing to HTML 5 as the “best technology for enterprise application development”, according to a statement issued on Friday, November 11 by two Adobe …
Well it's about time ...
I for one am getting damn fed up with getting a new "Flash update" every couple of weeks and having to click on the "I agree to the Terms" crap week after bloody week - yea, I know I should be reading the Terms and Endearments but who the blazes ever does - nope, the whole thing stops while I check the bloody "I agree" button again.
Flash, your time has come and gone - maybe Adobe can get its head of of the Internets collective rear end now and get back to being the fine company that it used to be - prior to Flash.
HTML5 has the potential to kill all manner of technologies in current use, so it better work great out of the box and identically with all implementations of browsers, starting from a particular point in the future. Maybe it'll be like that IPv6 and never actually be implemented...
"Flex SDK, which lets you develop applications for the Flash runtime"
Does this mean that they are, implicitly, opening the whole thing? I mean, if you can read the source of the toolchain that generates the content, inferring what you need to know to build a Flash player can't be very hard.
It would be ironic if the world finally got a reliable, cross-platform platform Flash player after (and because) Adobe junked it, and to judge from the numbers of upset Flash developers there is certainly the demand to create such a thing. Perhaps Gnash has a future.
It is murder!
Flash, if taken up as you describe, in the circumstances implicit, will invariably fall to the ages-old 'me-first-right-now-fuck-you' paradigm--which so distinguishes humanity--with the result that the progress of the effort, and the 'universality' of it--platform-wise, I mean--will almost certainly be ... uneven. The horror! The horror! By way of contrast, imagine a cultural cornerstone which holds that the priority application for limited, even scarce, resources is to direct them to the runt of the litter first. Impossible, right?
Flash is dead! Long live the pyre!
All the opcodes for AVM2 that AS3 uses have been around publicly for ages.
http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/AVM2/ActionScript+Virtual+Machine+2
That is a long long way from deriving a robust player, which the toolchain wont really help with. There are already others like Haxe, or the decompilers like Trillix that have this info and use it routinely for developing apps for flash player (swf files).
But the code that runs the virtual machine is closed, copyrighted, and would be a nightmare to build across different platforms... so much of a nightmare infact that Adobe appear to be giving up themselves.
Besides Flex Builder, does anyone out there know of an integrated development environment (IDE) that can not only match the convenience and feature set offered by Eclipse /Flex but that can also produce code (HTML5 or otherwise) that runs across IE, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari in a seamless fashion (without browser incompatibilities)?
Anyone? BUELLER?
*crickets chirping*
>My company has invested millions into committing to Flex
Funny that when you commit yourself to a proprietary ecosystem you pray it stays successful and you pray you don't get to successful and draw competition from the owner. If the dude doesn't have a migration strategy already well planned well then he deserves to be canned.
>The news has caused consternation among Flex developers. “It feels as though Adobe is completely abandoning Flex, and ultimately Flash … My company has invested millions into committing to Flex for our enterprise applications and now I don’t know what to tell them.” says Erich Cervantez, senior Flex developer for a large chain of health clubs.
Tell them Flex has moved to a similar developement model that runs Ubuntu and Android. What's the name of this 'large chain of health clubs'. And apart from a single anonymous 'health club` developer who else is experiencing consternation?
“The future of the Internet comes down to content – creating it and monetizing it. "
Letting these goals play out fully, might not be a world we want to live in. what is it with flash, flex, html 5? They are the building blocks for our links, our audio and video. this is no mystery. this doesn't need to be monetized.
Adobe work on making tools and get the hell out of the monetizing content. If you want to sell your video what the hell is it doing on flash, flex, or html 5 (the building blocks of sharing links audio and video)
If you want to sell your video you put it on a DVD and get a skew number.
Adobe has the potential to be a loved company, instead they have protesters out front of their headquarters.
Add into this mix all the "conspiracy theory" big brother acts, laws and crackdowns, each one being some rationalized conspiracy instead of labeled the attack on rights it truly is. But people are to busy with this entertainment crap to pay attention to all the individual attacks.
I am personally one hair from pulling the plug. There's a couple things that will do it for me, and they are now in the DOJ and other oath breaking treasonous government agencies.
If they pass the wrong things, then I will yank MY support for the entire thing, my websites I will delete, my accounts I will close, my ISP will lose money, the telco will lose money, my friends won't get their windows virus's cleaned, bands won't get videos, promoters won't get promotions, and bands won't sell their shit through me. I can't support your websites or infrastructure when it fucks you, you don't understand it's effects, and I know it. In essence, my not helping you is helping you not get in trouble with the law.
I will be done. And if it takes your business out cause you relied on me, tough shit, you should have listened to what the fuck I have been saying. I am not doing a felony for uploading a fucking video I shot.
Just when Flash was getting good, too. I can't wait for all of the HTML 5 ads to appear and start conflicting with each other, or for the people building them to find interesting ways of forcing you to look at them. At least with Flash you could get a plug-in to turn it off if you didn't want to see it.
Almost right. With Flash you could get a plug-in to turn it *on* if you *did* want to see it.
But that's really beside the point. HTML5 will not make it any harder *at all* to control annoying ads. Every browser lets you switch audio and video content on or off on a site-by-site basis, just as you can for Flash or Java. On the other hand, every defunct plug-in is one less place to hide security bugs and privacy breaches.
if they plan to gradually phase out livecycle i wonder about their cooperation with SAP - they have realized together the so called flash islands (integrated swf files in abap webdynpro platform) and the sap interactive forms by adobe (editable pdf's which upload the changed data back to the SAP web application server). I always found the technology of sap interactive forms by adobe a bit shoddy, the flash islands worked fine - Adobe seemed to not have a full understanding of the server technologies (logs, functions, etc). I think ADOBE will abandon livecycle eventually, it just doesn't bring enough value to the enterprise, because alone doesn't do much that is not available in ERP systems for instance - but probably the interactive forms will stay - they are after all only PDFs with editable fields so it should be easy to just keep it with adobe reader up-to-date.
A lot of Flex developers (possibly even a majority???) have moved to FDT from Flex Builder. Because of this, as someone else noted, this announcement (by itself) won't bother many of those most heavily invested in Flex. If you like Flex Builder, try FDT--you'll like it.
The anti-enterprise noise accompanying this announcement is confusing, however; and I wonder what this means for Adobe's support of Connect/ ConnectNow. Coldfusion I'm pretty sure is dead.
I think Adobe is making a huge misstep here. Their roadmap has become a huge confusing mess. The different divisions clearly aren't on the same page, or even in the same book. The company needs to split up.
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