License 2 Code

Adobe Liberates Flex. Moving the Flex SDK and compiler to open source is a nice move - will it matter? Apparently Adobe was listening to this blogger’s plea to open source Flex.

Ted Leung on the Air » Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web

Flash has a great cross platform story. One runtime, any platform. Penetration of the Flash Player is basically the same as penetration of browsers capable of supporting big AJAX apps. There are nice development tools. This is highly appealing.

What is not appealing is going back to a technology which is single sourced and controlled by a single vendor. If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web?

I can’t fault Ted for his concern. He’s on the money. But Adobe is winning my votes (I vote with my wallet) with Flex by creating a sweet development and deployment environment. The Flex IDE rocks! I don’t want to be forced into a Microsoft relationship with Adobe…but I will because it is head and shoulders better than the rest.

The title of this article is a little misleading. It’s really a great article by Bruce Eckel on how he arrived at the conclusion that Flex 2/ Flash is the right RIA platform for him. In my opinion, Flex 2 has a terrific IDE, produces usable applications, and is fairly fast to development applications in. I choose Flex when I’m building a web application (with a more traditional desktop feel), and I choose Ajax when I’m enhancing existing web applications (like making dialogs popup up inline and dynamically retrieve content).
Hybridizing Java

White Spy has been bringing the REST content to l2c, so when someone recommended this imaginary interview with an eBay architect on REST vs. SOAP, I had to read through. Interesting treatment, great way to draw out the differences.

Suggest an interview you’d like to see at l2c and we’ll see if we can swing it.

In fact, IE7’s release hasn’t blipped a single time on Central Standard Tech (best tech blogs evah). I mean, I realize that we *webdevs* *dislike* IE. But, this is the first major upgrade in 5 years to a browser that’s used by 80-90% of the world. I’d expect a little link love.

So, cheers to IE7! Now go download Firefox.

IE Link Love:

Internet Explorer 7 “mhtml:” Redirection Information Disclosure

Information on Reports of IE 7 Vulnerability

The beast has awoken; or, The beginning of Web 2.0

Firefox vs. IE 7 (IE7 having trouble with Google sites?)

A quick shoutout to Adobe and their Apollo project.

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Companies are beginning to look at RIAs and Ajax as the new GUI for their applications. The ability to serve a RIA in both a browser and as an application (think outside the browser window) will be a great advantage in leveraging existing in-house expertise. I know several third-parties have working versions of this.