4 ms·

It is pretty sound to be sceptical of any open-source offering from a company like Adobe. I'd much rather spend time learning some skills in an open source proj

It is pretty sound to be sceptical of any open-source offering from a company like Adobe. I'd much rather spend time learning some skills in an open source project where the full stack is open-sourced future proof. I'm sort of wary learning to code iPhone programs as well -- it seems cool, and there's lots of interesting ideas there -- but do I really want my hard-earned development skills to be dependent on the whims of Steve Jobs?

abyssknight 17y ago
Hearing this, I thought I'd jump in. The stack is open-sourced. The Flex SDK and BlazeDS (if I remember correctly) are both open-sourced, as well as the AMF specifications. There is absolutely no reason why you could not write AS3 code and MXML against the Flex libraries and build your own Flex application without Flex Builder (the IDE, which costs a paltry $199-$299 last time I checked). I've done it, and it does work. Is it a pain? Of course it is. Do you get the Adobe built data components you get with the advanced and charting editions? Nope. Can you build them yourself? Of course, and there's a bunch of open source controls & components you can download too. You really have to be careful whilst criticizing a company who essentially gave away their protocol and build tools. They could just as easily have marked that IDE and tookit up to $1,000 and we'd still buy it.
- sunkencity 17y ago
  The stack is not open source -- the player is a blob. One of my co-founders like flex and have programmed some admins in flex, in xml. Myself I don't care much for flash. I've dome some actionscript programming and presentation development but I only do it if I really have to. I much prefer to work with HTML/Javascript. My co-founder would like us to work with flex instead of rails which he dislikes. I have no love for programming in XML, so the middle ground is that we have coded up some small web frameworks in java with seaside-style html generation. It works fairly well.
  - abyssknight 17y ago
    I'll agree, Flash Player is not OSS (though projects to emulate this do exist), and it can be a royal pain but... You can definitely use Rails with Flex. Flex is not a server side language or framework. It can interface with all of them really well through web services. Heck, I'm pretty sure Flex can even inject and call JavaScript functions on your pages. Rails can render things to XML amazingly well, and you can still build an HTML response as well while maintaining the functionality of the Flex application. Your co-founder is comparing apples to oranges, but whatever works for you all is great. Just don't let the tools limit you.
    - sunkencity 17y ago
      I like flash/flex when it's used as part of a site, to display video, a game, or some presentation. There are too many benefits from using standard HTML as to not use it for the main plumbing of a site.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]

abyssknight 17y ago

Hearing this, I thought I'd jump in. The stack is open-sourced. The Flex SDK and BlazeDS (if I remember correctly) are both open-sourced, as well as the AMF specifications. There is absolutely no reason why you could not write AS3 code and MXML against the Flex libraries and build your own Flex application without Flex Builder (the IDE, which costs a paltry $199-$299 last time I checked). I've done it, and it does work. Is it a pain? Of course it is. Do you get the Adobe built data components you get with the advanced and charting editions? Nope. Can you build them yourself? Of course, and there's a bunch of open source controls & components you can download too. You really have to be careful whilst criticizing a company who essentially gave away their protocol and build tools. They could just as easily have marked that IDE and tookit up to $1,000 and we'd still buy it.

sunkencity 17y ago
The stack is not open source -- the player is a blob. One of my co-founders like flex and have programmed some admins in flex, in xml. Myself I don't care much for flash. I've dome some actionscript programming and presentation development but I only do it if I really have to. I much prefer to work with HTML/Javascript. My co-founder would like us to work with flex instead of rails which he dislikes. I have no love for programming in XML, so the middle ground is that we have coded up some small web frameworks in java with seaside-style html generation. It works fairly well.
- abyssknight 17y ago
  I'll agree, Flash Player is not OSS (though projects to emulate this do exist), and it can be a royal pain but... You can definitely use Rails with Flex. Flex is not a server side language or framework. It can interface with all of them really well through web services. Heck, I'm pretty sure Flex can even inject and call JavaScript functions on your pages. Rails can render things to XML amazingly well, and you can still build an HTML response as well while maintaining the functionality of the Flex application. Your co-founder is comparing apples to oranges, but whatever works for you all is great. Just don't let the tools limit you.
  - sunkencity 17y ago
    I like flash/flex when it's used as part of a site, to display video, a game, or some presentation. There are too many benefits from using standard HTML as to not use it for the main plumbing of a site.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]