Adobe Flex coverage at OSCON 07
I am sorry, what was that? You didnt realize that Flex was covered at oscon this year? Oh, well then you my dear friend have been mistaken. I had the pleasure of attending oscon last week and spreading the gospel of Flex and the Flash platform with many folks. Now I did not do this alone, Adobe’s own [Ryan Stewart](http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/) and [James Ward](http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/) where there in an official capacity to spread the love.
So what was the over all effect? I had the pleasure of leading several informal discussion groups in the expo hall talking about the Flash platform and the new technologies available in AIR. In general I think these things were very well received. Developers who are interested in building reliable solutions have good questions that fostered great discussion. People had many questions about what Tamarin was and how it related to flash. People were very interested to find out that they would soon be able to develop and deploy desktop applications using technology that they are already using every day.
But the real indicator of the interest level in flex came during a RIA Panel in which James was one of the presenters. On the panel was a lady presenting JavaFX, James was presenting on Flex and then no one bothered to represent Silverlight. Each of the presenters spent a bit of time doing a presentation and then the mic was opened for questions. I would say it would be a safe bet that 90% of the questions were directed to James. He did a great job answering those folks and even after the session he as bombarded by even more people with questions who didnt want to ask in front of the crowd. Being a proponent of Flex already I didnt really expect to get much out of the panel. However I did learn something I didnt expect. Of the few questions that were directed at JavaFX, the answer was mostly “How would you like that to happen”. Although JavaFX is being presented as a solution to compete with Flex and Silverlight, the product is no where near a stable revision. Everything is still up in the air. This is great if you want to commit the next year to helping design the tools you will be using in 2 years, but the easy choice is to use one of the alternatives already established. In fact on that note I cant think of any reason you would not want to use the platform that has been established for many years and who’s plugin is readily available on most computers. But now I am starting to let my headstrong opinions lead my statements.
In the end it was obvious that although the open source community is a new market for Flex, the developers are ready for a solution that can help them build exciting applications. And the fact that Flex is being open sourced did nothing but help open doors with the folks I talked to.
My only regret was that Adobe didnt have a booth at the conference so that more people could have been reached. But the good news is there is always next year! And maybe then we can have a real panel to compare Flex and JavaFX.
01 Aug 2007 Simeon
Good to hear this report. I get the impression the OS folks are all way too nerdy but I suspect many aren’t so bad.
While Flex is OS, I wonder what the OS people think about the Flash player (being proprietary–as if this is necessarily bad).
What were the non-starter questions? That is, what one or two really big things would the OS folks (the ones too far gone to really accept Flex) say to end the discussion about Flex/Flash?
Hey Phillip,
The platform and the developer tools are impressive, but you are right, the player is where some people get hung up. But you will see I worded my response carefully above “Developers who are interested in building reliable solutions”. I chose to leave out the part about the FSF Zealots that wont use something if its not free ( as in freedom). The big hangup in the panel was one guy who was harping on the license for the swf spec. Because adobe released the spec, but if you read the spec you cant build a player. So even if the community wanted to build a standards based flash player they can not.
But this is where I take those questions. I ask “How will you benifit in your day by the flash player being open source?” And the answers are usually pathetic. They complain about a single company controlling distribution, and how security bugs cant be fleshed out and yadda yadda yadda. But in the end I think that having a cost-free player that works runs on linux, mac and windows is a powerful thing. And by adobe controlling the distribution I dont have to worry about whether my code is going to run correctly in the player the user has.
I dont really want the flash player to be open sourced or forked because then the variants of the flash player will likely be just as bad as javascript in the browsers. And I hate AJAX as a business solution because there are so many ongoing hidden costs in maintenance.
But again there was much more positive disussion than there were debates over flash player. So I see it as a win for the flex team in the open source arena.