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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...
6:25 AM
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.
8:23 AM
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