Adobe Flex to go Open Source

April 30, 2007 @ 12:06 pm- from Maui, Hawaii

Apparently Microsoft's entry into the RIA space with Silverlight is spurring Adobe to keep its lead in this space by going open source with Adobe Flex. For those of you that don't know, Flex is a pretty good Flash hosted application framework that is squarely geared at the application development market. I've farted around with Flex a bit and it's actually quite nice. And you can actually quite easily hook up to ASP.NET backend data by using XML or Web services as your messaging interfaces. It's fairly straight forward and produces very usable results in short order.

I'm no fan of any Adobe products, but Flex caught my attention a few months back as I was working on a project that had a Flex front end. My job was to interface the server side with the client front end building an application service. The end result was pretty flexible app that takes advantage of .NET and Flex together.

One thing Adobe got right is that it has many easy to use adapters that make it VERY easy to consume data in a lot of different formats from a number of sources - Xml, Web Services, Flash Remoting, remote data adapters and a couple others - with extremely easy to use components and data binding mechanisms. They also have done a nice job to ship with a solid set of controls that are required to be productive quickly.

There's nothing there that you can't do with Microsoft tools - WPF can do most of this stuff if you build a full WPF application today. But Microsoft currently lacks the clean packaging of the components into a coherent whole. With Microsoft tools you'll be building a lot of plumbing and controls on your own.

Now I really have high hopes for Silverlight to bring a similar model to the Microsoft Platform. The big advantage of Silverlight will surely be the ability to write .NET code to run on the client to hook up the logic. A lot of people have been chomping at the bit to get .NET down to the client in combination with the browser and this is where Microsoft has a big win. The real question will be how much of .NET and WPF will be able to fit into the micro version of Silverlight and what kind of component model will Microsoft offer to allow building of an infrastructure for developers and third parties to fill the need to custom controls.

Looks like some of the vendors like Telerik are already on the ball creating components, although I'm not sure how much use I really have for rotating cube and carousal selector/list controls... <shrug>. How about the basics to build applications that are missing in WPF as a whole?

Mix this week will tell...

Posted in ASP.NET WCF Silverlight

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re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by yaip April 30, 2007 @ 1:03 pm

Though Adobe is ahead right now, I can guarantee that it won't be for long. I've not messed around with Flex but I most definitely will with Silverline.

Also, just like me, there are thousand of MSDN developers who are already using VS and will have Expressions for free. So it's only logical for them to use Silverline.

And of course, Microsoft has thousands of smart people. So they will do a good job catching up. I guess, we have to be a bit patient.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Rick Strahl April 30, 2007 @ 2:38 pm

Yaip your faith in Microsoft is strong <s>. Use the power Luke!

Seriously though, from what was announced today Silverlight 1.1 looks extremely promising but the proof's in the pudding. Let's see what the execution looks like. Microsoft is very good at providing core APIs and system level functionality, but at the higher level recently things have not been so promising and I think that this will be a key aspect to the success of Silverlight.

I'll be digging in with this stuff this week and I'm looking forward to it.

Also, I personally feel that it's important to look at what 'the other guys' are doing from time to time. As it is I feel I'm way too MS centric in that often I don't even know what's happening outside of the MS universe, and often times this can be to my own detriment. Certainly my experience with Flex a while back has helped me better understand what I would like to see in a RIA type tool.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Aaron April 30, 2007 @ 3:44 pm

Its nice that Adobe listens to the crazies telling every one that will listen that to truly be cross platform you must be opensource. But they just killed their product. now every branch will have a different run time, that is a terrific user experience.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by yaip April 30, 2007 @ 3:53 pm

Did I say Silverline? I meant Silverlight.

It would be nice to have a tutorial posted that would take a basic application (with 2 or 3 pages) and take it thru' VS, Expressions, etc.

But you are absolutely right. It's good to know what others are doing.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Rick Strahl April 30, 2007 @ 4:50 pm

Aaron, probably. More than anything the open sourcing is a PR stunt, more than anything. But I think this step and especially the timing just before Microsoft officially unwraps SilverLight tells volumes about the marketing aspects.

I think it'll be good for Microsoft to have a definite competition in this space...

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by WoodHawk April 30, 2007 @ 9:26 pm

I've just started to look at Flex and so far I'm impressed. I considered Flex some time ago, but the licensing fees were very high in the 1.x versions. With 2.0 they eliminated that issue.

I see Flex 2.0 being stronger in the area of already having a complete set of skinnable controls that ship with the product. Right out of the box you get a nicely functional DataGrid, tab control, combo boxes, etc. I don't believe any of these controls come with Silverlight (at least they weren't in WPF/E). It seems to me that Flex has the big lead here. While I like the idea of having .NET as part of Silverlight 1.1 my understanding is that this is the micro version of the Framework and I'm not sure what amount of functionality has been stripped out.

I was able to take one Flex tutorial and build a grid component client side that consumes an RSS feed in a little more than a 1/2 dozen lines of code. I like the way Flex parsed the inbound XML document and made it easy to write databinding expressions against it. Pretty impressive.

If you haven't already checked this out visit http://www.flex.org/dotnet/ - The Fluorine project provides an open source remoting gateway for Flex that appears to make it pretty easy to access backend .NET objects easily from Flex. There are similar gateways for Java, PHP, Ruby, etc.

If nothing else it's nice to have choices and the competition is great for improving product quality.... as developers we all benefit.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by yaip May 01, 2007 @ 1:08 pm

WoodHawk - Flex is pretty cool but my concern as a developer is it integrating well with VS. When I am in VS and developing a page, I hate to go outside and launch an application. Historically MS always has done a wonderful job <b>integrating their own tools</b>. From initial demos, using Silverlight with VS seems to be pretty easy.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Rick Strahl May 01, 2007 @ 1:21 pm

Ah, but you'll likely have to do the same with Silverlight and WPF in general for a while. Visual Studio currently has horrible support for XAML and right now at least Expression Blend is what they recommend (which is an external tool).

It's not clear on whether Orcas will include better tools for WPF but from what I've heard the focus is on Blend for 'beautiful' tooling. Hopefully this will change, but my guess is that it's pretty late in their dev cycle to add completely new tools into VS Orcas. There's certainly nothing there right now - Silverlight development currently in Orcas is via XAML Xml markup.

But I hear 'ya. I would also prefer to have better integration directly in VS.NET although I've been working a fair bit with external tools lately and it's not as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. For example, I've been using Aptana extensively for Ajax work and after the initial grumbling about using an external tool I'm more than happy to use that powerful JS editor for the features it provides... Heck even if something is hosted IN VS.NET you have context switches as well - it's not like integration is always seemless anyway. Whether you switch a tab in VS or switch applications is not really a deal breaker <s>.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by yaip May 01, 2007 @ 2:04 pm

I just took a look at Aptana. I must confess that I had never heard of it before. It looks impressive. But my concern is, do I have to learn one more thing. I am a ASP.NET developer using VB.NET. I do look at JavaScript code but I am not at all proficient with it. With Apta, do I need to be an expert on Ruby on Rails?

BTW, What would be a good resource for Flex and ASP.NET/VS?

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Rick Strahl May 01, 2007 @ 3:18 pm

I just use Aptana for JavaScript editing - there's nothing to learn. You just open your documents as a file in Aptana and you're done. You still use VS to compile and debug your JavaScript code (or rather FireBug in FireFox more likely). Aptana has a ton of other features (like integration with various JS frameworks) but that's all optional. I use it purely as a JS editor.

As to Flex resources with ASP.NET - I don't know. Not too many I'd guess... <s>. But again I don't think this is necessarily rocket science, you can use ASP.NET as a service style backend either REST or SOAP endpoints to feed the data to a Flex UI.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Rick G. Garibay May 01, 2007 @ 3:20 pm

Adobe should be rightfully concerned. This is a watershed moment for web development: http://rickgaribay.net/archive/2007/04/30/Let-There-Be-Silverlight.aspx

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by yaip May 01, 2007 @ 4:05 pm

"you can use ASP.NET as a service style backend either REST or SOAP endpoints to feed the data to a Flex UI"

An step-by-step example would be great! What I need to do in VS, what I need to do in Flex SDK, what components I need to deploy on the server, etc. etc. - I know, I am being greedy :)

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by WoodHawk May 01, 2007 @ 8:09 pm

Yaip - try downloading the free trial of the Flex Builder IDE. The documentation for Flex includes some tutorials that you can walk through. There is small sample where you connect to an external RSS feed. I found it was very simple to consume the resultant XML file and databind a grid control right to it. If you go to the Flex.org site you'll see a bunch of additional links to the online documentation and samples.

Don't get me wrong I'm generally a strong supporter of Microsoft and VS.NET. I generally believe the VS.NET tool is best in class. However, when you go through the tutorials in Flex you begin to realize that Adobe's tool is pretty good as well. In fact, as Rick pointed out it's a better experience than what Microsoft currently offers around Silverlight (XAML) development. To me the whole Flex development process felt a lot like building a WinForms application. That something most VS.NET developers will be quite comfortable with. Give it a shot and you may be surprised.

For now I'm continuing with my exploration of Flex and will be watching Silverlight as well. At the moment I think Flex has the lead, but Microsoft will certainly try hard to catch up.

re: Adobe Flex to go Open Source
by Pablo Roca May 05, 2007 @ 3:42 am

I think that Microsoft Silverlight has a very good competitor now. This is good for Microsoft, Adobe and the users.

Even the Flex Open Source announcement is mere a "I wash my image doing this" action. But this will lead more developers to Flex.

Flex seems a very cool product, actually far better than the Silverlight stuff. Also Apollo seems quite nice. The user interface, the controls and the easy to build a solution with Flex is amazing. I'll dig more on the Flex and Apollo.