JD on EP

Make your AS3 compiler (just the compiler) available for free (after release), a la Microsoft. That's probably outside your scope too, but i thought i mention it anyways.

Hi John,

The biggest issue at the moment appears to be that Adobe doesn't have an official position on whether or not core Flash Platform protocols such as RTMP and AMF are open or not.

Adobe's position on the legal standing of individual open source projects really isn't a priority and it would be impractical and unnecessary to require Adobe to state its position on such things. However, the Flash community does need to know where Adobe stands with regards to the core protocols of the Flash Platform and whether they will remain closed and proprietary or whether they will be opened up.

Having its core protocols open is a necessary prerequisite to wide-spread adoption of Flash in the age of Web 2.0 as an RIA platform. Although AJAX may not be at the same level of maturity as Flash in terms of development tools and perhaps ease of cross-platform deployment/compatibility, it *is* based on open technologies and this is a *big* competitive advantage in the eyes of many web/application developers.

Regardless of the road Adobe takes with regards to the openness of the Flash Platform, I don't see Flash going away anytime soon. However, whether or not it maintains its position as a major web application platform in the age of the Internet-as-application-server remains to be seen and will, no doubt, be influenced by these decisions.

Those of us who have been building RIAs for over half a decade now know both the immediate utility and future potential of Flash as quite possibly *the* RIA platform in the dawning age of rich-client Internet applications. Where there were only promises of rich web application interfaces in the HTML/Javascript world, we were actively building rich web application interfaces. Flash has a considerable lead and mature development tools that are about to undergo a generational shift with the introduction of Flex 2.

The only thing holding back the widespread adoption of Flash is the proprietary, closed nature of its core protocols. If and when Adobe opens these protocols and truly embraces the possibilities of the Flash Platform, we should see an explosion in widespread adoption -- the Flash Platform, and our amazing community of developers deserves no less.

Hi and happy new year to everybody.

Just a comment to point out other issues more focused on the
ActionScript language itself.

I wonder why I have to read Brendan Eich blog or listen to a Gillmor Gang podcast
to have news about ActionScript 3 ?

These are great news and I think would interest a lot of flash dev,
perharps a little more communication from Adobe to where the language
is heading (in its design) could be welcome.

I'm also in favour to have a free AS3 compiler, look at how easyly accessible are Java language or
.NET languages with free command line tools, and it doesn't cut down the need for IDE not-free tools.

Imho not only open source flash project can enable growth of the flash platform,
if you allow easy acces to the ActionScript language itself it can also benefit the platform.

Not sure... I see one mention of "flash" in the Eich piece cited, and the podcast has no scannable transcript. There's lots of talk about AS3 in the lists, now that it's a public alpha with collaborative docs.

Recap: I'm trying to settle the top three bullet points about opensource to emphasize to other staffers. So far I've got "Please try to get legal philosophy published for unpublished filespecs like AMF and RTMP."

At some point in the comments you got "I wanted to credit Edwin Smith of Macromedia with the nice special form by which a class can define its own "to" operator:", perhaps it's just me but I would have loved to see an article/blog/anything from Edwin Smith talking about that.

For a partial transcript of the podcast I posted
some scrapnotes here.

I think that the bullet point I'm talking about is "please document even more the design process of the ActionScript language", right now there is a big code base of ActionScript 2 open source projects and imho taking more time to explain why things are done like that could help even more open sourcers to evolve their project to the next release of the language.

AFAIK, all the successfull open source projects that you can see in Java and C# will be ported to ECMAScript 4, if they can be ported first for ActionScript 3 and then reused/adapted later for JS2 or even JSCript.NET it could bring a very good aura to the flash platform.