Skip to main content

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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Python script to set genre in iTunes with Last.fm tags

Now that I have started to seriously use iTunes I figured it might be nice to have the genre tag set in a meaningful way. Since I have a reasonably large collection of mp3s doing that manually was out of question - I wrote me a Python script to do that. There seems to be a large demand for such a functionality (at least I found a lot of questions on how to automatically set the genre tag) so maybe someone else finds the script useful. It is pasted below. General Strategy The basic idea is to use Last.fm's tags for genre tagging. In iTunes the genre tag is IMO best used when it only contains one single genre, i.e. something like "Electronica", not something like "Electronica / Dance". On the other hand dropping all but one tag would lose a lot of information, so I decided to use the groupings tag for additional information that is contained in the list of tags that an artist has on Last.fm. In the example above that would be something like "Electronica, Dan
15 comments
Read more

Germany’s most anticipated Web 2.0 sites - one year later

I just came across a post about Germany's most anticipated Web2.0 sites that dates back to last August. Since this is almost exactly one year ago I decided to spend half an hour of my life and conduct a completely unscientific survey to see how many of these startups are still around. For this reason I simply looked at the web sites to see if they are still here and checked if there are recent posts in the company blog to check if the site is a zombie (if there is no blog I checked the press releases). The result is: 51% are still around, 36% are gone (or not started one year later). The rest seems shaky (last blog post 6 months ago) or unknown (state cannot be determined by looking at the blog). If you consider that these startups were above the rest ("highly anticipated") and that checking if there are even online one year later is a very low barrier I was surprised by the low survival ratio. But one can regard this as positive: "quick failure" is a good stra
2 comments
Read more