Why I’m Not Using Adobe Flex (yet?)
I was just reading Per Olesen’s blog entry about Adobe Flex and the fact that it’s closed source and proprietary, and it hit me that the reason I haven’t tried Flex is because the source isn’t available. I remember years ago at eBay when we were using C#/ASP.NET 1.1 for internal web app development and it was so frustrating because when an exception was thrown inside the framework, you’d hit the “no source wall”: the place where the stack trace leads you to code that you can’t look at. At least in the Java framework I can trace through the code and even set breakpoints in framework code so I could figure out if it was my code’s fault or a bug in the framework. Usually it was my code, but whereas in Java I could figure out what I was doing wrong by looking at the Java framework code, in ASP.NET I often just gave up and tried a completely different way of solving the problem (usually by tossing out the use of ADO.NET). Sometimes I even went to the Mono source to see what they’re doing and it did help when I was creating ASP widgets, but it’s not the same thing as having all of the source available with the ability to step into it in a debugger.
I haven’t followed .NET development much since I left eBay, but I’ve noticed that Microsoft has opened up some of the .NET framework source, which is definitely a move in the right direction.
So, I guess subconsciously I’ve been staying away from otherwise appealing frameworks if I can’t access the source code. And it doesn’t have to be “open source”, as in GPL, LGPL, etc., but I at least want the option of seeing it if I need to. I don’t mind proprietary, but without the source, I’m going to choose another framework, my time is too valuable to hit my head against the wall otherwise.
