Since I don’t keep as up-to-date with tools at work as I would like to, it came as a little bit of a surprise that Adobe had given Flex over to the Apache foundation as Apache Flex.
The decision is made within Adobe to incubate Flex at the ASF. Work starts on the incubation proposal, on explaining internally what this means, on the legal/IP clearance steps required to donate the code and on recruiting initial committers who will help get the project started.
Obviously, I was a little slow on the uptake. However, things really didn’t get rolling until last year.
Apache Flex is voted in as a top level project at the December board meeting of the Apache Software Foundation.
And in February, Apache Flex released its first true new version of Flex with Flex 4.9. The last true version of Adobe Flex was 4.7. The Apache 4.8 version was just a migration of the project and basically the same as 4.7. Since I’ve been busy learning the new spark components in 4.6, I wanted to make sure things worked the same in Apache Flex 4.9. The install of Apache Flex was fairly simple. They have installer applications to make things simple and it connected fine to my version of Flash Builder 4.0. All I had to do was click on the application Properties and change the Flex Compiler to Apache Flex 4.9. Everything compiled and ran as expected.
I hope that Apache does well with Flex and it continues to grow and expand. I’m trying to learn how to create a BB10 application using Adobe AIR, which is supported by the Apache Flex, just like Adobe Flex did.
Dean has been playing around with programming ever since his family got an IBM PC back in the early 80's. Things have changed since BASICA and Dean has dabbled in HTML, JavaScript, Action Script, Flex, Flash, PHP, C#, C++, J2ME and SQL. On this site Dean likes to share his adventures in coding. And since programming isn't enough of a time killer, Dean has also picked up the hobby of short film creation.
