Sponsors
  • Intel
  • Microsoft
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  • BT
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  • Yahoo! Inc.
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  • Disney
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  • Ingres
  • JasperSoft
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  • Mozilla Corporation
  • Novell, Inc.
  • Open Invention Network
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  • Tenth Planet
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  • White Oak Technologies, Inc.
  • XAware
  • ZDNet

Sponsorship Opportunities

For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at the conference, contact Sharon Cordesse at scordesse@oreilly.com.

Download the OSCON Sponsor/Exhibitor Prospectus

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Flex: the Open Source SDK for RIAs

Duane Nickull (Adobe Systems), James Ward (Adobe) Moderated by: Duane Nickull
Web Applications
Location: F151

On April 26, 2007, Adobe announced strategic plans to move the development of Flex to an open source model.

Adobe is to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, that have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser—on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and now on the desktop using “AIR.”

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice.

License

The source code for the Flex SDK will be available under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). The MPL will allow full and free access to the source code, allowing developers to download, extend, and contribute to the source code for the Flex compiler and framework classes. The Flex SDK will also be available under a commercial Adobe license. Offering a choice of licenses serves the needs of enterprise Flex customers and partners.

Mozilla Public License FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/mpl-faq.html

The annotated Mozilla Public License (explained in layman’s terms) http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1-annotated.html

Schedule

The source code for the Flex framework is already available within the free distribution of the current Flex 2 SDK. By summer 2007, Adobe plans to put in place most of the infrastructure (public bug database and public daily builds) required to run the Flex SDK as an open source project. We expect to complete the transition to a fully open source project (source code for the compiler, infrastructure for community contributions, etc.) by early 2008.

Currently Supported Platforms

  • Windows XP, Server 2003, or Windows Vista Professional/Ultimate with Java 1.4 (Sun, IBM, or BEA) or 1.5 (Sun) * Mac OS X 10.4.x, Java 1.5 (as shipped from Apple) on PowerPC and Intel processor * Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 or 4, Suse 10, Java 1.4 (Sun, IBM, or BEA) or 1.5 (Sun)
  • Solaris 9, 10, Java 1.4 or 1.5 (Sun) Compilers only

More Information and FAQ

This FAQ will provide all the details and hopefully answer all your questions.

  • Flex Open Source FAQ
Photo of Duane Nickull

Duane Nickull

Adobe Systems

As Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, Duane Nickull is responsible for Adobe’s messaging around enterprise solutions in the SOA and Web Services spaces plus other forward looking aspects such as the Web 2.0. Previously Mr. Nickull co-founded Yellow Dragon Software Corporation, a privately held developer of XML messaging and metadata management software, acquired by Adobe in 2003. He previously served as CTO and President of XML Global Technologies, a publicly traded company acquired by Xenos Group in early 2003. Mr. Nickull has written or participated in most of the larger SOA standards work in the past decade. He currently chairs the OASIS Service Oriented Architecture Reference Model Technical Committee (SOA-RM TC) which has just delivered a Reference Model for Service Oriented Architecture as a full OASIS standard. He served as a Vice Chair of the United Nations Centre for Facilitation of Commerce and Trade (UN/CEFACT) between 2003 and 2006. Within the United Nations, he oversaw the UN’s Electronic Business strategy and Service Oriented Architecture and modeling efforts. He has served as the project team lead of the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) Electronic Business Architecture Group (SOA) and a specially appointed liaison between the W3C, UN and OASIS standards consortiums. Additionally, Duane has served as the chair and lead system architect for the United Nation’s Electronic Business Working Group, a direct sub-group of CEFACT TMG and on the CEFACT TMG Steering Committee. He also has served as the Co-chair of the ebXML Technical Architecture group as well as co-editor of that specification starting in 1999, largely recognized as the first post-internet and post XML SOA. He has participated in writing many of the recent large Service Oriented Architectures that permeate the IT landscape today such as the W3C Web Services Architecture and also co wrote the Mackenzie-Nickull Meta-model for Architectural Patterns. Mr. Nickull has written and contributed many technical articles and books on these subjects Mr. Nickull has been called Mr. SOA by his peers during introductions to speak on the subject due to his overwhelming experience writing and contributing to the major Service Oriented Architectures (SOA’s). Between 1995 and 2006, he spoke at over 500 venues in various countries around the world Duane has recently renewed his work in the theoretical field of computational intelligence and has recently spoken several times to various audiences via the Ontolog Forum on eventcausality aware inference engines coupled to a query-able ontology. Such mechanisms may one day bestow true cognitive and reasoning capabilities upon applications. In the field of semantic reconciliation, Duane was a co-inventor of the first Context-sensitive XML Search Engine (www.goxml.com) and the first web based XML E-Commerce ASP. He is named on pending patents pertaining to XML indexing and retrieval covering 51 unique points. He also served as Technical Director for XSLT.com during the 1990’s until as recently as 2002. He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and three children, plays in a rock band, actively snowboards, races Porsche 911’s and mountain bikes. Duane first came to Vancouver playing in an original band in 1985 and made his living as a professional musician for several years.

James Ward

Adobe

TBD

OSCON 2008