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.
Actually, the source for the flex framework is available. Its “just” the flashplayer, that isn’t
But that is also pretty darn irritating.
But, .. you compare it to how you could do better in Java. Actually, you have not, until very recently, been able to look into the sources of the JVM. And the JVM is the correct part to compare to the flashplayer.
I have a lot of the same thoughts as you, on the value of open source. But, it shouldn’t keep you from trying flex. It really is great.
Comment by Tech Per — March 1, 2008 @ 1:34 pm