Are Flash and Flex Web Technologies?

Throughout this week and part of last, I’ve been working (in between meetings) on getting Alfresco Labs 3.0 set up on my laptop to be able to demo (and experiment with) their new Share application. The challenge has been in getting the flash-based preview of uploaded multi-page PDF documents working (see this thread in the Alfresco forums for some of the details).

The way the feature should work is that the Alfresco Share application takes the PDF a user uploads into the document library, converts it to an SWF using swftools (one frame of the SWF per each page of the PDF), and then uses the YUI framework to “play” the resulting SWF.

The problem is that for me, depending on the version of Flash installed, the preview SWF cannot be displayed. (Short version: Flash 9.0.45-47 works fine, later Flash versions just result in a spinning cursor which never resolves. The problem is Flash 9.0.45 breaks file upload, which works in later Flash versions).

Good Flash

Bad Flash

Just finding this out required a lengthy exercise including full uninstalls of Flash (using Flash uninstaller for Mac OS X, which takes forever since it is a PowerPC binary running on an Intel machine) along with installs of various versions of Flash from the 9.x archive.

It was in this context that I was so happy to see the dialogue Dion Almaer and Brad Neuberg posted at Ajaxian today: How Flash Can Join The Open Web.
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Flash, Flex, Open Source?

(Via Alex Russell’s blog I came across Mike Shaver’s “Being Open About Being Closed,” which is an excellent discussion of Adobe’s positioning of the Flash player and Flex in Top 10 Adobe Flex Misconceptions.

As Mike points out, the fact that the Tamarin is an open source project, and that various people in the community have over time deciphered the SWF file format, does not make Flash anything other than a proprietary product.

In many of the presentations I give about rich Internet applications, I use a slide which looks something like this:

It’s intended to communicate two key concepts:

1. There are a huge number of mature, professional open source toolkits and frameworks for building RIAs.
2. There is strong pressure on proprietary, closed, commercial toolkits and frameworks in this space to open up, at least in terms of source code visibility and modifiability, if not in terms of redistribution.

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