Apache moves Flex forward, should Flash be next?

Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

Paula Rooney Contributor

Paula Rooney has covered the software and technology industry for more than 20 years, starting with semiconductor design and mini-computer systems at EDN News and later focused on PC software companies including Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell and other open source and commercial software companies for CRN and PCWeek. She received a silver award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors in 2005 for her profile on Linus Torvalds and edited and co-authored "Partnering With Microsoft," a book about Microsoft's channel published by CMP Publishing in 2004.

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Posted in Linux and Open Source on January 15, 2013 | Topic: Developer

The Apache Software Foundation is once again trying to resurrect a once-hot technology project developed by Macromedia and purchased by Adobe.

To that end, the ASF announced this week that Flex has been elevated to a Top Level Project from incubation and the availability of Apache Flex 4.9 with support for Flash versions 10.2 through 11.5 as well as support for Java 7 for compiling the SDK.

The future of Adobe Flash, and of course Flex, has been heavily debated with the emergence of HTML 5 and other web app dev technologies. Nevertheless, there are strong backers who maintain that there's still a place for Flash and Flex.  Flex was donated to the ASF in late 2011.

Flex is an open source software development kit for deploying cross platform rich web applications based on Flash.

Might be nice for Adobe to donate Flash to the ASP, though it's not clear how much of the proprietary Flash and AIR components are part of the company's new lineup of HTML5-based Edge tools.