Adobe to Release Flex to Open Source Mozilla Foundation
Source: BetaNews
Written by Scott M. Fulton, III
Taking the next step to even the stakes in the emerging platform battle in rich Internet application development, Adobe announced this morning it would be releasing its Flex development environment for Flash applications to the open source community, through the Mozilla Foundation.
The move comes as Google and Microsoft step up their separate efforts to boost enthusiasm around Asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX). While Adobe is not typically known for being a development tools supplier, in some respects, it had nothing to lose by letting go of the reins of Flex, and certainly a lot to gain by building a broader community around Flash.
The Flex SDK was already released for free; what this move is intended to do is help coalesce a development community from outside Adobe around building Flex as a platform.
The basic purpose of Flex is to utilize the scalable vector graphics tools brought forth by Flash, to construct a rich set of controls that can be bound to Web services. So while you might hear a lot about “Flex applications,” there are some variables to that: You don’t develop stand-alone applications with Flex; and, as it turns out with today’s Web development, you don’t develop stand-alone applications with any single component anyway