Adobe will turn over its Flex SDK 4.6 development environment to the Apache Software Foundation, as the company claims to further its commitment to HTML5 as the “best technology for enterprise application development” in the long term.
Adobe recently updated its “Your Questions About Flex" page to include information on what will happen to the program. Earlier this month, the company announced it would cease development on Flash for mobile devices. And in August, the company rolled out a public preview of Edge, a motion interaction design tool for creating animated Web content based on CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.
Adobe said in its blog that it is preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and BlazeDS to Apache. It will contribute the core of Flex along with yet-to-be-released components, including ViewStack, Accordion, DateField, DateChooser and an enhanced DataGrid. Additionally, Adobe will be contributing portions of Falcon, a next-generation MXML and ActionScript compiler.
Although Flex has been open source since version 3, Adobe used to own the road map and decide what and when new features would be implemented. Now, members of Apache will provide the leadership and direction for the project.
Adobe reported that it will continue to support applications built with Flex as well as future versions of the SDK running within the Adobe Flash Player. AIR applications will also be supported indefinitely.
