Hi Charles, Answers integrated below:
So this is what I mean by the subject line. My understanding is that the Flash and Air runtimes have not been open sourced which poses a vulnerability , so I think , that whatever advancements made to the runtimes by Adobe will be incompatible with the Apache Flex project's advancements. >That is not necessarily true. Think of the Flex framework as a Java project >like Hibernate or Spring and the Flash Player like the Java Virtual Machine. >Oracle controls the Java virtual machine's direction and features. When they >add new features, any of the existing projects are free to use them. So, while >Oracle may not decide to implement a feature simply to aid a Spring use case, >it does not preclude Spring from using it. Am I correct ? Adobe is claiming a buffer period of 5 years for projects builit with Flash Builder 4 i.e. Flex SDK 4.6x but after 5 years that code is also subject to be rendered incompatible with the newer runtimes. >No. Adobe is promising that existing code will run for a minimum of 5 years on >the existing runtimes with no changes. That does not mean that code will cease >to work, etc. Remember, Flash Player today still runs code written in the 90s >and before. However, from their perspective, things like the iPhone didn't >even exist 5 years ago, so it is difficult to predict what shape the runtime >may take in future years... they are providing a minimum just so customers >understand they have at least that time without significant risk. There's also the possibility that changes to the Adobe runtimes to accommodate for example Windows 8 may render Flex apps dead on Windows 8. >That is highly unlikely and I am unsure where you are getting that >information. There is still ongoing discussion on how things like Flash may be >supported on windows 8 as it is still in development. As such, Adobe has not >direct control over decisions that Microsoft makes, just like decisions that >Apple makes. Further, as you just noted above, they have already said Flex >apps will work in the existing runtimes for a minimum of 5 years. The bigger >risks in this area are Microsoft 'pulling an apple' in certain areas and >deciding Flash Player wouldn't be allowed. However, even in the case of Apple, >we have a solution to deploy there and would anticipate one here. All risks I understand but I guess my over reaching question is what is Apache Flex doing so that Flex will be able to run on the probably forever to be ubiquitous upcoming Adobe runtimes. >Going back to my Java metaphor. We, right now, are deploying only on Adobe >runtimes. This means all of our development and all of our testing is on these >runtimes. In other words, we watch for changes to our virtual machine, we >decide which ones we want to use, and we use them where applicable. Make sense? Mike
