Flash is a platform [LWN.net]

Flash is a platform

Posted May 16, 2008 15:06 UTC (Fri) by creyes123 (subscriber, #49450)
Parent article: Adobe releases Flash Player 10 beta

I've developed a non-trivial application using Adobe Flex (http://www.rcadvisor.com), an
application framework that sits on top of Flash. Think 'platform-independent Silverlight with
a couple year lead'. Sun is going to get into this space soon with JavaFX. My first version
was made using Dojo (an AJAX library). I'm glad I switched. In the most part, Flex works very
well.

I use Linux for all my development, and Flash works fine. There are issues with Opera, but it
is not a supported browser (under Linux), anyway.

Adobe is not afraid to tackle big complex development projects (it's all relative I suppose,
but you know what I mean). To keep costs down, they use a ton of Indian developers. Quick
distributed development of complex projects leads to lots of bugs. Take a look at their bug
database at http://bugs.adobe.com/. Scary.

Open source software is just as buggy, and I'm only using the open source core of Flex,
anyway. But I feel bad for the folks that pay $700 for the Professional version of Flex and
find themselves hitting bug after bug.

(Log in to post comments)

Flash is a platform

Posted May 22, 2008 16:13 UTC (Thu) by lysse (subscriber, #3190) [Link]

Should I feel good or bad that I can't use anything you develop?

Flash is a platform

Posted May 27, 2008 12:56 UTC (Tue) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

Of course, working on Mono I'm biased, but...

Think 'platform-independent Silverlight with a couple year lead'.

...the reality is that Flash (and Flex) are "platform-independent" only on paper, and in practice work only where Adobe cares to release its plugin (and ofter poorly even there, seeing all the issues we have with Flash on Linux).

Silverlight, on the other hand, has a Free Software implementation (Moonlight) which is "blessed" as the official implementation on Linux, while remaining Free.
IMHO, this is way better then the Flash situation, and it's not something that we have to wait for, it's already there.

So, choosing Flex over Silverlight for purely technical reasons is something I can understand, but choosing it because it is "platform-independent" is something I don't get...

Just my two cents.