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Flex Open Source? Right...

There is a bug in the Flash player that makes it impossible to implement a RESTful architecture with a Flex or Flash backend. In essence, it is a buggy implementation of an http client - the client cannot get to the response body unless the reponse code is 200.. This is really bad. But what is an embarrassment for Adobe is that:
  1. That bug was opened more than a year ago
  2. It is marked as priority C only
  3. It was closed and had to be reopened after the community complained
  4. Adobe engineers suggested as a workaround to purchase LCDS Server
So, lessons learned (actually: lessons that proof in practice what was clear beforehand):
  1. It does not matter too much if Flex is open-sourced as long as the Flash player is not
  2. It does not matter at all if Flex or Flash are open-sourced if the community cannot apply patches and get them into the deployed player
Flex being open source is completely irrelevant.

Comments

Chrigel said…
Hey Michael

I just stumbled upon this one last night. Flex is suddenly not so sexy anymore. I dunno wether the RestService under http://lab.arc90.com/2008/03/restservice.php will do , considering the rather huge drawback that it only seems to be usable in Adobe AIR. Haven't tried it yet...

Oh well...
Michael Marth said…
Well, there are workarounds, but that does not help with Adobe's "Flex is open source"-claim. We can work around this, but we cannot fix it.
Thanks for the pointer - quite a nice write-up of the situation.

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