N. Alex Rupp's Blog

Open Source Flex alternatives require broad industry support

"When a scientist says something is possible, they're probably underestimating how long it will take. But if they say it's impossible, they're probably wrong" --Nobel Prize Winner Richard Smalley.

In this case they're definitely wrong. Four years ago, while working for marchFIRST, I helped build a Flash-XML-Java driven site for building and configuring skinnable rich media blog sites. We built this for Proctor & Gamble's Tremor.com project.

I've not used Flex, specifically because I would like to bring similar products to the Open Source market. The licensing restrictions for the beta versions were a bit draconian, and I'm careful to avoid potential future legal enganglements when intellectual property law and Open Source software is concerned.

At this time, there is no alternative product to Flex or Lazlo that offers a competitive feature set. Such a configurable suite could be assembled with Flash MX and the library of Open Source J2EE and XML technologies available from the Apache Software Foundation & The Codehaus. The problem with running an Open Source project to build a Flash-XML-based UI framework is that very few Open Source developers can afford the Flash MX development suite, and at the moment, I count myself among them. If a framework of this kind is ever to make it to the Open Source marketplace, broad industry support will be required. However much I'd like to personally fund a project to develop this technology, I cannot at this time, and have no desire to go it alone.

Tomcat, Geronimo, Apache, none of these Open Source technologies would exist for us to use if companies like Sun, IBM, HP, Apple, BEA and the ASF weren't willing to cooperatively drive the standards, share ideas and contribute time and energy to providing the necessary development infrastructure. This strategy has proven to be extremely successful and practical.

The reason we don't have Open Source products for developing Shockwave media is not because the shockwave format is top secret. It's not. OpenSWF.org is a good place to start if you're looking for Open Source SWF editors.

But in terms of features, Macromedia has outperformed the competition and achieved a virtual monopoly status in the marketplace with their tool sets. To their credit they did this by delivering better products to the market before their competitors could. But the perception is that now they dictate the standards, can bring their reference implementations to market long before anyone else and in recent years, as one of my readers recently put it, "they've grown haughty".

The world has been content to rest on their laurels while this happened. Now it seems that Macromedia can charge any sum they want for their products, because they're the only game in town. The prices of the MX 2004 product line illustrate this. Back in 1998, a small business could easily afford a handful of licenses for Flash 3. With Macromedia chasing the high end of the market, what are the little guys going to do?

Communities are improved by the presence of strong business, and businesses are improved when they join together into communities. That's what Open Source is all about--it's what separates us from the Free Software crowd. Unfortunately, the talking heads in the technical press usually don't recognize the distinction, and Open Source gets all the bad press that Free Software rightly deserves. If you check out Gluecode's website, you'll see their motto is "Open for business." I've never seen a better phrase to sum up the relationship between Open Source and the marketplace. (Gluecode, by the way, is my pick for "Company most likely to destroy the JBoss Group")

Macromedia's shown us what's possible with the technology, and they've done a fine job addressing the desires of the market. But there's also a gigantic and growing market for affordable alternatives. If we want affordable alternatives to Flex, then we need to generate them. Any successful effort to bring shockwave products to the Open Source market would greatly benefit from Macromedia's leadership and support.

Macromedia is no bogeyman. They've recently broken their MX 2004 suite into two editions, but they still each cost over a thousand dollars. Their older products aren't getting much cheaper, either.

I am going to be at the Microsoft TechEd conference next week in San Diego. Anyone who wants to meet with me there and discuss the possibility of developing Java and XML driven Shockwave technologies for the Open Source market should send me an email. Any help Macromedia can offer will be welcomed with open arms.

Comments

• Macromedia's plugin is the rub
  You'll note that there is not a lot of Open Source for the Windows Platform. This is not because Windows formats and APIs are secret, but because Windows is proprietary and subject to change by Microsoft whenever they get the whim to make a change.

  Any Open Source project that relies on Macromedia's proprietary plugin will be held hostage to their whims. Think back to all the attempts to unify the Instant Messaging services... Whenever progress was made the IM providers would "enhance" their services to break the unified service.

  This may or may not be a show-stopper. Just something to consider.

  Posted by: johnreynolds on May 19, 2004 at 06:40 AM

• Macromedia's plugin is the rub
  Well, truth be told, Microsoft really can't simply change thier API on whim; they would lose support rather quickly if the rate of change was too great and didn't have at least some reasonable justification for their customers.

  The same holds for Sun's Java(tm). JCP notwithstanding, Sun can do as they please with Java(tm), but they probably won't because, despite being the proprietary owners of Java(tm), they need the support of the developer community.

  There *are* plenty of open-source projects for Windows. Many are not described as such or targeted for Windows; most C apps can be built for Windows. Others, such as thse written in Ruby or PHP, are cross-platform out of the box. But, even stll, there are numerous projects writen in VB or C# as well.
  The question with Macromedia, or any other company offering a useful but proprietary API, is the balance of their benefit from community goodwill, versus their being the sole controlling authority for that API.
  Perhaps if they offered the API spec to a standards body, such as ECMA or the IETF, developers would have some assurance that the owners put more value on the former than the latter.
  

  Posted by: jamesbritt on May 19, 2004 at 08:10 AM

• will you be at JavaOne?
  I've been thinking about this too. Will you be at javaOne? I would like to talk to anyone about an open source alternative to FLEX.

  Posted by: tmcgee on May 19, 2004 at 10:10 AM

• Macromedia's plugin is the rub
  I'm not a Flash developer so I'm not sure on how flash mx differs from normal flash. Couldn't you develop the interface with flash tools from MM, use flash remoting for server calls and then use OpenAMF when you project needs to go live?

  Posted by: analogueboy on May 20, 2004 at 02:25 AM

• will you be at JavaOne?
  Unfortunately, I will not be at JavaOne this year. I might be at OSCon. I'll definitely be at TechEd next week. I'll blog more about that. :)

  Posted by: n_alex on May 21, 2004 at 11:07 AM

• Nothing stopping this show but inertia.
  Every Open Source software product I use and develop is for the Windows platform. And for Linux. And anything else that will run Java :)

  This is Java, remember? We go wherever we want.

  Any Open Source project that supports Macromedia's published SWF specification docs will be able to work with Flash files. We won't get the next versions of the spec until after Macromedia's already developed tools for it (hey, maybe we will--who knows?). But the fact that the spec is published makes this topic possible. All we really need to do is work with the OpenSWF community that's already out there, and get some good code written :)

  Posted by: n_alex on May 21, 2004 at 11:12 AM

• Agreed
  The point you make here is something I've been thinking about quite a bit of late. Shockwave, like Java, is a Platform. I wouldn't want the Java platform to be Open Sourced--that would be terrible. Every vendor would have their own special JVM, and we'd have all these wierd portability issues with it. It's nice to have a standard platform to build on. The trick with Shockwave is developing the tool-vendor market around Shockwave, so that products like Flash and Flex aren't the only game in town.

  One of the nicest things about Java is how Sun works with the different vendors through the JCP in order to come to a concensus about the future direction of the platform. It lets other players in the market help steer the direction of the technology, and at least gives us some sense of what's coming down the pipe.

  Perhaps some sort of Shockwave Community Process could accomplish the same thing. They could model it after the Java Community Process, and like Sun, Macromedia could have a veto on all the different specification requests.

  My concern is that there just doesn't seem to be much interest or will from the industry at large to press for this sort of a community-driven specification process. It's clear that Macromedia wants Shockwave to be the de facto standard, and I for one would love for that to be the case. But developers and customers are scared to really get in bed with Shockwave because of Macromedia's extreme concentration of control over the spec and the products.

  The more I think about this whole issue, and peel past the layers of issues, the more I want to figure out a way for Macromedia to duplicate what Sun has done with Java. In order to do this, we've got to look past the situation as it presently exists, which is frustrating. The future could be a lot less frustrating.

  Posted by: n_alex on May 21, 2004 at 11:26 AM

• MX is just the name of the tool set
  Flash MX is normal Flash. It's just a marketing term, like Windows ME or Windows XP. When we talk about FlashMX 2004, we mean the latest release of the Flash develpment tools.

  HTH :)
  

  Posted by: n_alex on May 21, 2004 at 11:38 AM

• I am a beginner in Java and Flash. Could you give me a "hello world" sample using openAMF from java project into flash presentation? This sample will help me to start and I'm really appreciate for the help. Please send it to samuel@britesoftcorp.com. Thank you.
  

  Posted by: neosamz on October 06, 2004 at 12:23 AM

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