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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

It's the weirdest experience to see someone aggressively defend free software on the adobe.com website with Oracle as the target.

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yeah really. i get the idea that mr mcallister isn't a regular user of flex/ flash builder.

I looked outside just to check, hell didn't freeze over. Still, I'll be watching the evening news, just in case.

Surprisingly, the flex SDK is open source: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/

And there is at least one open source IDE that uses it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashDevelop

Also, the main part of the Flash Player is open source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_%28JavaScript_engine%29

And if I understand it correctly, the only reason it's not is due to licensing and patent stuff that is out of the control of Adobe.

the "sdk" is open source, but flex builder isn't (and they managed to break stuff that worked fine in eclipse). and have fun trying to get the flex builder plugin to work on linux, or even get the sdk working completely on linux.

I tried to do some flex development on linux two years ago from the command-line & I finally gave up & switched to the IDE. I hate languages where serious development is only possible from within a specific IDE. The kind of stuff I was trying to do is now fairly easy with Canvas, so good riddance to Flex!

You can also try OpenLazslo

We actually looked into that but LZX seemed like too much of a hassle. Bad call?

Have fun trying to read long non-wrapping lines of code scrolling horizontally.

I mean, come ON! A plugin for freakin' word-wrap?!

Can you explain?

The Flex Builder IDE (I used 3, but I think it's propagated on to 4 as well) does not have word-wrap when editing code. There's nothing you can do in any settings dialog or menu option to be able to comfortably edit long lines of code without scrolling.

You need to install a plugin to enable this. Granted, this is a limitation of the underlying Eclipse on which it is built, but I was using Flex Builder, not Eclipse, so my beef stands.

Citations: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/451245, http://www.communitymx.com/abstract.cfm?cid=E0D9F

Also the Flex APIs are extremely tightly bound to closed-source Flash APIs, so its really not an entity unto itself. To be fair though, it is "open" enough to allow for example IntelliJ to support Flex development in IDEA.

Really, try FlashDevelop. It works well in Wine, and there's a beta version of it that works with Mono.

The open source SDK/IDEs are so cumbersome that unless you value your time at zero, it's much easier to just bite the bullet and buy the commercial Flex Builder IDE.

Have you tried FlashDevelop?

Not recently, I tried it a few years ago and it didn't seem like it would work for me for some reason. If it's a viable alternative to the Adobe tools, that's great.

Pot calling the kettle black much?

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