Last Friday (November 11th 2011) the Flex Product team made a huge announcement about the future of Flex. The initial impression from the post, in-conjunction with the Flash Mobile announcement, caused a lot of controversy and confusion about the current state of Flex, Adobe’s overall goals with Flex and how they planned to handle Flex in the future.
Yesterday (Nov. 15th), the product team updated the post with a lot more clarity and details about what Adobe is doing with Flex. The core take-away with this update is that Adobe will be donating nearly all of the Flex eco-system (excluding the Flash Player, AIR & Flash Builder) to Apache:
We are preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and BlazeDS at the Apache Software Foundation.
In addition to contributing the core Flex SDK (including automation and advanced data visualization components), Adobe also plans to donate the following:
- Complete, but yet-to-be-released, Spark components, including ViewStack, Accordion, DateField, DateChooser and an enhanced DataGrid.
- BlazeDS, the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Flex applications.
- Falcon, the next-generation MXML and ActionScript compiler that is currently under development (this will be contributed when complete in 2012)
- Falcon JS, an experimental cross-compiler from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript.
- Flex testing tools, as used previously by Adobe, so as to ensure successful continued development of Flex with high quality
Adobe will also have a team of Flex SDK engineers contributing to those new Apache projects as their full-time responsibility. Adobe has in-development work already started, including additional Spark-based components.
Adobe also plans to continue support of current and future versions of Flex within the Flash Player, AIR runtimes, and Flash Builder. We definitely recommend reading the full post on the Flex Product teams blog.
