I was flabbergasted when Adobe wrote me earlier this week to ask me for a quote for their move to open source Flex. Flex is a platform for building rich internet applications in Flash through an application description language MXML and Javascript-variant called ActionScript and a set of server side classes to support the creation of these along with access to various data sources. Adobe is open sourcing the SDK, compilers and documentation. To see how powerful the Flex platform is, take a look on the Flex web site. These screenshots don't do justice to the interactivity that Flex provides over an AJAX application.
You can drag and drop paint on a wall in this Flex-enabled Sherwin-Williams paint site.
I like to think that Alfresco had something to do with Adobe going open source with Flex. As long as Flex was not open source, we couldn't really incorporate it into our solutions or Web Content Management framework. We made the argument to Adobe's management that if Flex were open source, not only could we use it, but it could take off as fast as other open source web projects and perhaps define the next generation of the web.
The Alfresco developers definitely wanted to use it to build applications. Since it uses Flash, Flex eliminates a lot of the idiosyncrasies of the various web browsers. But look at the capabilities that Flex adds to SAP's dashboards. That is the real reason that the developers wanted to use it.
This SAP process designer provides you with all interactivity of fat client, but can also be used in a web page.
The Adobe/Macromedia web products such as ColdFusion have lost ground to all the PHP solutions out there. This move by Adobe, along with their new Apollo platform, could revolutionize how we use the web. Things that couldn't really be done is a web application can now be done - or at least now in open source. This will have a profound impact on business intelligence, charting, real-time monitoring, rich graphical navigation, dynamic content, any sort of drill down, mashed up video and a host of other capabilities that we have really only seen in fat clients. Now that Flex is open source, it releases the creativity of an exponentially larger set of developers to explore and innovate.
Yahoo Maps can provide a higher level of capabilities and interactivity using Flex than Google Maps.
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