On 1/23/12 12:22 PM, "Rick Winscot" <rick.wins...@gmail.com> wrote:
> No confusion on my part Alex - I'm well versed in the Flash Player 'branched
> execution model' and SWF forward / backward compatibility.
>
> Here's the red-flag for you... what if Adobe decides to expand UIA
> restrictions to block potentially unsafe operations? Do you remember this?
Adobe reserves the right to break existing apps for security reasons. I
don't think Adobe really has a choice in the matter. But in general, those
kinds of changes don't affect the Flex source code. Adobe's goal is that
every line of source code we donate in the 4.6 drop and gets baked into a
SWF with SWF Version 13 will continue to run forever on all future players
for a minimum of 5 years. You can come up with any number of worst-case
scenarios where this kind of statement isn't good enough, but I think you
simply have to be able to deal with the risks. Every once in a while a
change to the Java VM breaks stuff too.
> It's irresponsible to think that freezing on a particular version of
> playerglobal.swc and setting compatibility version to stun... is a
> set-it-and-forget-it kind of thing.
I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about it. Adobe has no interest in
spending time and energy in breaking existing content. They will only do so
purposefully for security reasons.
>
> Will old SWFs continue to run in new versions of the Flash Player? IMO ( feel
> free to disagree ), the answer would be 'maybe.'
For sure, the answer is 'maybe' because, besides the need to close a
security hole, there could simply be a bug. But Adobe has promised to try
to fix those bugs as well.
There is no certainty regarding the player's future, but Adobe is not out to
make Apache Flex fail. Quite the opposite. There will be bumps in the road
ahead, and quite frankly, I think the Apache development model will allow us
to react to these bumps even better than Adobe did. That's because anybody
can make a fix and cut a release. At Adobe, we had to worry about revenue
recognition, synchronization with other release dates in the company, etc.
--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
