From: Amit Goel [mailto:agoel....@gmail.com] Sent: 15 January 2012 06:41
> Adobe will be donating the Flex SDK, and not the AVM/playerglobals etc. > So Adobe will continue to own the legacy on Flash and it's heart - > ActionScript/AVM. Adobe will continue to own and control the flash players and the AVM. There will be no requirement for Apache Flex to target the AVM in the long run though if we choose to put the effort into compiling to other targets. Whilst Adobe will own the specification of ActionScript 3, we will own the mxmlc and falcon compilers. We therefore get to choose what changes we make to the language that Flex is written in. If our changes require us to rename the language to ApacheScript or some such, then so be it. > I am just thinking past sometime around the period of Flex3, > if this same incubation could have done that time, is there a single > member in the community could even think of developing Flex4 SDK > with spark containers? This makes no sense to me. Are you suggesting open source communities couldn't have created spark? I suggest you take a look at the size of some of the other Apache projects, and projects like Linux to get an idea of what the open source community can achieve. Flex 3 to Flex 4 was a small change compared with what many of us are planning for Apache Flex: an interface, composition & DI-based framework written in AS3++ targeting JavaScript and HTML5 no less. > ... we are restricted to the SDK alone, and has to wait and see Adobe > releases for AVM/Flash Player etc. Utter nonsense. If Adobe release new versions of the Flash Player that are of benefit to us (multi-threading maybe?), then great, we'll use those new features. If Adobe stopped development of the Flash Player today though, it would make little difference to the amount of development we can do with Flex. > You see Alex telling ... that a blank interface in AVM consumes around 1K > and loads extra 250 bytes to an SWF! I laughed when I saw that. Seriously, what is Alex so worried about? With Flex SWFs often weighing in in the megabytes size-frame and the runtime using 100s megabytes, if not gigabytes of RAM, who gives a shit about 250 extra bytes in a SWF!? And again, even if hundreds of extra interfaces causes a problematic size increase for some projects, we will be in control of the compiler. Therefore we could easily develop a tool that, for example, strips many of the interfaces out of Flex in order to create a FlexLite version, with much smaller SWF and runtime memory usage. > I am a great supporter of Flex, and want Apache Flex to live long! Then stop your negative whinging and get working on Apache Flex. Pick something you'd like to do with it, tell us here to see if anyone wants to help you and get coding... David.
