Flex - the road to Web 3...?

HC: Recently Adobe decided to release the Flex SDK to open source. Why did you decide to do that?

Dave Gruber: Adobe believes that Flex can grow faster, as well as better meet the needs of the Flex development community by making it available under an open source license.

HC: Does this mean that Adobe will no longer be in control of the future development of Flex?

Dave Gruber: Adobe will continue to be the primary contributors and leaders for the ongoing evolution of Flex, with members of the current Flex SDK development, QA, and product teams continuing as full-time contributors to this open source project. Adobe will continue to invest in the ongoing framework and language evolution.

HC: From the developer’s perspective what are the major advantages of having Flex as open source? What are the kinds of things which we will be able to do in future which we haven’t been able to do in the past?

Dave Gruber: Open sourcing Flex empowers both open source and commercial developers to extend and enhance the Flex framework to suit their own needs and to contribute to the evolution of the Flex framework. Web and desktop developers using Flex will now be able to directly discuss ideas and proposals with project committees, submit code through the open bug tracking system, or contribute enhancements directly to the Flex project. Over time, Adobe also plans to introduce new subprojects that extend the core Flex Project.

HC: While the Flex SDK is free, the FlexBuilder IDE isn’t. For anyone dipping their toes into Flex development for the first time, are there are any inexpensive of free tools available?

Dave Gruber: The Flex SDK provides the compilers and debugger that enable developers to create and deploy Flex applications without the use of Flex Builder. There are also other third-party products starting to become available that can help with Flex development.

Adobe FlexBuilder 2 is an Eclipse-based IDE for developing rich Internet applications with the Adobe Flex framework.

HC: How does FlexBuilder differ from the Flash authoring system?

Dave Gruber: Flex is a technology that is primarily built for application developers. Flash is built for creative professionals. Both technologies leverage the Flash Player runtime and the ActionScript programming model. Flash is time-line based, which is generally a foreign concept for application developers. Flex provides a simpler, drag-and-drop design view complete with over 100 pre-built UI design components that developers can use to construct application UIs. Flex provides a powerful code development and debugging environment, in addition to the visual design and layout capability. Flex also provides sophisticated data handling capabilities, enabling developers to process large quantities of data locally on the client.

HC: While Flash is now ubiquitous on the web, I think many people have a negative view of the technology. I’m think thinking particularly of those incredibly irritating Flash animated advertisements that fly around over the page you are trying to read. Can you put Flash in a more positive light? In what ways would our experience of the web be diminished if Flash weren’t there?

Dave Gruber: Today’s Flash Player is very different to what it was in years past. The addition of the Flash Player Virtual Machine added a high-performance client runtime that can power very sophisticated, data-intensive applications. This added capability completely changed the Flash Player forever, making it not only a client-side process for animated content, but now capable of high-speed data and logic handling, serialised data interchange with the server, integrated audio-video, and much more.

The Flash Player is the most widely deployed piece of software in the world today, installed on 97% of all Internet connected desktops in the world. It plays an important role in the overall Internet economy, and is now playing an important role in rich Internet application deployment, already in use by many of the largest public Internet destinations including maps.yahoo.com, finance.google.com, Google analytics and EBay. It also is being used behind the firewall in a large and growing number of the world’s largest companies.

HC: Flex applications can be created from drag-and-drop components in much the same way as VB or Delphi applications - with the big difference that Flex applications live inside the web browser. Is this the start of the end of the HTML-based web? If AJAX is the face of Web 2, is Flex the face of Web 3?

Dave Gruber: HTML will live on for the long, foreseeable future. AJAX has exposed important capabilities that have existed in the browser for years, and is therefore part of the core fabric of the Internet. Much like Flash enabled designers to go beyond what was possible in the standard browser, Flex enables developers to create much richer applications then possible using html/AJAX while using a familiar development approach. Flex also opens up new possibilities to easily create new classes of applications that leverage real-time data streaming, publish-subscribe data interaction, integrated audio-video, and with the new Adobe Integrated Runtime (Adobe AIR, formerly code-named Apollo), now deploy Internet applications to the desktop. While some might call this the beginning of Web 3.0, the capabilities that Flex provides surely moves the web well beyond anything the world has seen in the past.

HC: Let’s suppose I am about to embark on developing a web application - say a Blog or a shopping site. I’m considering a few options such as coding it from scratch in PHP, use a development framework such as Ruby On Rails, a ready-to-run application such as Joomla - or Flex. Is there anything Flex gives me that the other solutions don’t?

Dave Gruber: Yes, very definitely there is. Flex provides a framework for creating a much richer, more responsive user interaction experience. Because logic now runs on the client and Flash supports smooth animations, the application can incorporate drag and drop, drawing, smooth transitions, and local data drill-down and validation.

It is important to also note here that Flex still requires a server-side programming language, so in addition to coding the client in Flex, a developer would still use PHP, Ruby, Java, ColdFusion, or .NET to code the backend business and database logic. Flex provides a clear separation of UI from services supporting SOA.

HC: Recently, Microsoft has entered the fray with the launch of its Silverlight technology. This, just like Flex/Flash, lets you create interactive applications using streaming graphics and video. Moreover, Silverlight will be programmable using a variety of different languages - such as JavaScript, Python, VB and Ruby. This choice of languages surely gives it a huge advantage over Flex, doesn¹t it?

Dave Gruber: While Silverlight may provide a compelling solution for Microsoft developers at some point in the future, Flex provides a complete development and deployment model that solves the cross-platform RIA problem today. With the Flash Player already deployed on 97% of all Internet connected desktops, developers can confidently build and deploy RIAs today. Rich Internet applications are fast becoming a strategic competitive imperative, and companies need to invest in technologies that they can be confident in deploying today. Flex is a mature, proven cross-platform technology from a company who has a long track-record in providing cross-platform Internet software.

HC: I note that Adobe has announced some projects to help developers integrate other languages with Flex. Will it be possible to program Flex applications fro scratch in, say, PHP or Ruby? Or are these projects some kind of ‘bridge’ between other languages/frameworks and Flex?

If the latter, will there ever be the possibility of programming Flex applications entirely in languages other than ActionScript?

Dave Gruber: These projects help developers leverage Flex as a rich client technology still using ActionScript 3 and MXML as the client programming language. The Flash Player is the runtime for Flex applications and it requires the use of ActionScript as the programming language – therefore there are not currently other options for developing Flex client-side logic.

HC: Finally, in your opinion, how will Flex change the way we use the web over the next few years?

Dave Gruber: Flex already has begun to affect the web in many ways. Web 2.0 is a term that has been used to define the next generation of web experiences, and Flex has become a key enabling technology in the delivery of Web 2.0. Flex introduced capabilities that were previously unavailable to most internet application developers. With Flex 2 being almost a year old this month, we are only now beginning to see these capabilities appear in mainstream applications, both in public sites and behind the firewall. Innovative Web 2.0 companies are leveraging Flex to introduce new classes of applications that fundamentally changing today’s Internet computing model. Software-as-a-service is quickly becoming part of our everyday world and Flex provides a development model and runtime to support it.

The future of the web is truly in the hands and minds of developers around the world. Adobe Flex simply provides these developers with a productive, cross-platform environment to exploit their ideas and produce the next generation of the web.

Links
 Adobe Flex: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
 Adobe FlexBuilder: http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/flexbuilder/
 Adobe AIR: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/
 Microsoft Silverlight: http://silverlight.net/