On 5/8/12 7:08 PM, "Michael Montoya" <montoyl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> One very general thought is that it would be wonderful if we could develop a
> native means for viewing PDF documents in Flex. In my experience this has been
> the Achille's heel of our Flex apps and has led to very kludgy work-arounds
> using server-side Image Magick to convert the document to images (lately we've
> been exploring swftools). This is less than ideal for all the obvious
> reasons... I'm surprised Adobe never addressed this, but it would be wonderful
> if we could.
It was a matter of priorities and resources. Doing full PDF is a boatload
of work, but I've also wondered how far you'd get with some basic effort.
>
> My other question/concern is this - while Adobe has ceded Flex to the
> community, isn't Flex virtually useless without the Flash Player to run the
> compiled bitecode?
Flex currently required Flash, but folks seem interested in targeting other
stacks.
>
> Am I the only troubled by the fact that Adobe has given us the keys to a
> Ferrari with no engine. While I applaud their latest features as of Molehill -
> particularly access to the GPU through AGAL, what's to stop them from pulling
> the plug on Flash Player development altogether thereby rendering the fruits
> of our labor utterly useless?
There's a difference between stopping feature development in Flash Player
and somehow wiping the face of the earth of every Flash Player. Already,
Adobe is focusing Flash Player feature development on gaming and not on
RIAs. Apache Flex will try to leverage the gaming features where possible,
but I think we can be quite successful with the player APIs in SWF version
14. And even if someday Adobe were to stop feature development on Flash
Player, I can't imagine it would be ever be in Adobe's interest in breaking
the web by somehow trying to break existing installs of Flash Player or
prevent future installs.
>
> While I can certainly envision new and exciting capabilities for Apache Flex,
> doesn't true innovation require coordination with the Flash VM and hence,
> player development - not to mention Actionscript?
Sure, having control of the player and language would help, but I think we
can do well with what we have.
>
--
Alex Harui
Flex SDK Team
Adobe Systems, Inc.
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
