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Open Source Flex

Perhaps I'll be making changes to the Flex compiler once again. The Flex SDK is going open source.

This is a great day for Flex! A few random thoughts:

1. I think the biggest change for a long time will not be open submissions but open bug reports. In time, the community contributors will matter more, but having everyone adding and sorting bugs will be a big deal. Flex has had a great beta program, but it doesn't compare to having everyone on the bug base.

2. I joked about making compiler changes above, but in the long term, I'm most excited to see what people do with the AS3 and Flex compilers. I always enjoyed compiler work, but I don't count myself in the group of people who thrive off of it. There's a small group of people who love compiler work and can change how we write code. While there's a number of these people already working on AS3 and Flex, I hope a few more are inspired by this.

3. The number of cool new Flex components is going to make my head spin.

4. The SDK was already free, so it doesn't change the revenue model for Adobe. This means (or at least I think it means) we still get a large team of developers working full-time on all things Flex.

5. In time, we will start seeing AS3 in the strangest places. Since both the runtime (in Tamarin) and the compiler will be available, people will end up putting AS3 in new plug-ins, devices, and more.

6. I'm happy that this is going to take awhile to get out there. That sounds strange, I know. But I don't want to see the team get too distracted from working on Flex 3, as I'm still waiting for a few features. After that, I'll be ready to play.

Comments (1)

The Joy of Flex, at http://www.colettas.org/?p=88 , brings up another good point on future direction, which is that there will be a large number of versions of the existing components or changes to make a lot more permutations possible. I see this happening as well, given the number of changes I've had to make to the existing components.