It has been almost a year since we announced Flex would be donated to Apache. We’ve spent all of this time preparing donations of the code. It has taken much longer than I would have ever imagined, but we are almost done. The FalconJS code passed legal review yesterday and just needs a few other approvals before being donated.
I’ve had some time to play with it. It can definitely take a simple AS class and spit out that class in JS in a predictable pattern. What the donated code will not do is convert an entire Flex app into a running HTML/CSS/JS app. In fact, it won’t even take a simple AS project and generated a running HTML/CSS/JS page. That’s because only the code that converts the AST to JS is being donated. If you ever saw the demo, there was a whole bunch of JS code that could mimic FlashPlayer APIs and render Flash visuals to SVG. That code is not being donated, and, I don’t think we want it. That’s because Flex is all about interaction and rendering to SVG is not a rendering that would be interactive. I have been playing around with Falcon JS to help me form an opinion on what the next steps are, but I need some sign-offs from folks in Adobe before I can make it public. In the meantime, make sure you look at the slide deck from Michael Labriola’s 360Min presentation on how he is developing apps for HTML. I’m sure he’ll reply with the link. There are three things I think you should take away from that deck: 1) that there is an alternative really soon if you want to move to C#, and 2) that “finishing” the UI is very expensive due to rendering differences between browsers, and 3) that having good separation between UI and business logic is key to having an efficient way of “finishing” your UI. These will be important things to keep in mind as we go forward. Later, -- Alex Harui Flex SDK Team Adobe Systems, Inc. http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui
