Farata Systems      

Today Adobe has announced that a large portion of the next version of Flex goes open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). Here’s the partial list of what becomes open: mxml, compc, and ActionScript compiler, command line debugger FDB, Flex framework and RPC libraries and testing infrastructure.

These are some of the components and tools that will not be open sourced: Flex Builder, Charting components, Flash Player, Apollo.

This is a step toward creating a wider Flex 2 market. The interest to rich Internet technologies grows leaps and bounds, and Adobe Flex is one of the leaders in this league. There is already a decent number of developers who are interested in Flex and Adobe hopes that open sourcing Flex will bring more developers on board.

The source code of the Flex framework was available all the time, but the developers could have improved it by extending these components. But now they will be able to improve the original components as well.

Another good thing is that the third-party component developers will be able to include Flex compilers into their components. To the best of my knowledge, MPL will allow third parties distribute their own components under any other licenses as long as the original Flex code stays under MPL.

Next week we’ll start selling our first commercial Flex components and plugins at myflex.org. I’d love to hear an explanations of the MPL licensing from one of the Adobe officials using these components as an example. Does this move really encourages commercial component development by small companies?
The Web tier compiler is a gray area though – it’ll be open sourced for Apache containers and Microsoft IIS.
I was not able to get a clear answer if the third-party developers will be able to include Flex Web compiler into components deployed under commercial J2EE servers. In May, we are releasing our flagship component called FlexBI, which uses Flex Web compiler. Yesterday, we were assuming that it would by our customer’s responsibility to obtain Web tier compiler from Adobe. Will it change with open sourcing Flex? Are we allowed to include the Web tier compiler without worrying about what J2EE server our customer will deploy it under? What do you say, Adobe?

How are you planning to fix the Flex bugs in the new world? Sun Microsystems has so called bug parade for Java. People were able to vote for bugs, and the most “popular bugs” were supposed to be taken care of. This was a failure because some of the most voted bugs were sitting there for 7 years.

What about forking Flex framework? Is this going to be an issue?

One more question. Are we allowed to copy paste a chunk of the Flex source code into our commercial component as long as we keep references to the original author of this piece of code?

The FAQ on open source Flex, is written in Legal language, it would be nice to have an explanation in English with some use cases I’ve mentioned above.
Adobe will still govern the modifications of the Flex libraries – they’ll set up the repositories for the Flex source code, will set up builds, etc.

I believe that open sourcing Flex will draw attention of some serious developers to the new kid on the block. The Flex team may become substantially larger.

Yakov Fain

Ted Patrick, a noted Flex Evangelist from Adobe has published a list of top dozen of consulting firms that offer application development using Adobe Flex. We are happy to see our firm, Farata Systems in this list.
Ted writes, “The list is based on the consulting firms that I have worked with directly and who have delivered multiple successful Flex applications to clients. In every case you will find that the firms know Flex inside out and are some of the best minds in the business of RIA application development.”

Thank you Ted, and I’d like to use this opportunity to introduce ourselves to those who did not have a chance to work with us yet.

We’ve put lots of efforts into studying Flex Framework – we’ve spent time going deep under the Flex skin, learning its source code to make sure we can offer the most efficient solutions to our customers. The fact that Flex is a well designed extensible framework has allowed us to start building our own components and plugins that dramatically improved our team’s productivity while working on the enterprise applications with Flex and Java, and this week we are going to offer Beta version of some of these components at myflex.org.

Besides offering consulting services, we blog and publish technical articles, we’ve published a book “Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java“, and we teach Flex based on our real-world experience of developing enterprise applications.

Please let us know if you need help with any of your Flex-related projects.

Yakov Fain

Out of all my Flex-related work, teaching is my most enjoyable activity. This is an extract of upcoming confirmed public Flex training classes that I’ll be involved with in Spring-Summer ’07.

On April 12, I’m starting my Flex hands-on Intro class at New York University that consists of five weekly evening sessions. I taught such a class last November, and in my opinion, it’s the most efficient way of learning Flex programming – students have a week for self-studies between the sessions, and then in class they get answers for some not so obvious programming concepts.
Beside this one, my partner Victor and I will be running a series of intensive one-day Flex workshops across the country. First, we ran such workshop as a part of the AjaxWorld conference last month in New York City. We’ve received very positive feedback and were invited to re-run this class in various cities across the USA. This hands-on-bring-your-laptop class consists of two parts – during the first 4 hours you’ll learn the basics of Flex, and after lunch you’ll be learning how to use Flex with the server side programs (we use Tomcat and MySQL Server database). This workshop is geared toward busy enterprise developers and managers, who can’t afford taking a week off for training but need a jump start for their upcoming Flex projects.
These are the dates/cities for this one-day workshop:
June 24, New York, NY
July 23, Washington D.C.
August 27, Austin, TX,
September 23, Santa Clara, CA,
October 15, Minneapolis, MN
Farata Systems also offers this workshop, but at a slower pace as a two-days deal – let me know if you’d like to run it at your site.

During the same period I’ll be running a couple of Adobe Certified training classes, but these are for enterprise clients of Farata Systems and they are not available for general public.
See you in class,
Yakov Fain