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Adobe Plans to Donate Flex to Apache, Now That HTML5 Is Taking Over

Adobe is providing more details on its decision to let go of Flex development

Nov 17, 2011 14:31 GMT  ·  By
Adobe Flex is headed to the Apache Software Foundation
   Adobe Flex is headed to the Apache Software Foundation

Adobe has provided more details and an announcement which should be of great importance to Flex developers. The company had said that it plans to move the project to an open source outfit and has now unveiled that it is working with the Apache Software Foundation for this.

In a few updates to the initial announcement, Adobe says it plans to offload both Flex SDK and BlazeDS to Apache.

Still, Adobe says it will continue to be involved in the development of the projects, but so will community members and contributors. Adobe is also giving up the leadership of the Flex project, meaning the roadmap will no longer be Adobe's to decide.

"We are preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and BlazeDS at the Apache Software Foundation," the company is now saying.

"Adobe will also have a team of Flex SDK engineers contributing to those new Apache projects as their full-time responsibility. Adobe has in-development work already started, including additional Spark-based components," it said.

Adobe also plans to donate several other related tools. The Spark components will be donated as soon as they are completed.

Falcon, an MXML and ActionScript compiler that Adobe has been working on, will also be donated when it's ready, in 2012.

Falcon JS, a converter of sorts from MXML and ActionScript to HTML and JavaScript that is still experimental is also on the list.

Adobe is also providing more details on what the move means for Flex, which has been open source for a while now.

But, whereas until now the project was still headed and developed in-house by Adobe, those roles will be greatly diminished now, even though some people at Adobe will still be working on Flex with the open-source community.

Finally, Adobe is also rectifying something it said in the initial announcement. While it believes that HML5 is the future and that standard web technologies, such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript will eventually be able to do everything that Flex does, they're not quite there yet and it may still be a few years until web technologies catch up.