Basically, it is now business to create a library and become the first to have it in AS3... probably not an evident niche to the rest of us because AIR has not hit the streets yet, but I can bet more than one company is doing something in those lines.
Everyday individuals and companies are porting libraries to the Flash platform that existed in other languages – those that were ported to other languages before it. I don't think this is any revelation. The capabilities of the Flash platform have expanded to make this possible. A c/cpp to AS processor doesn't change the situation.
The real differentiator in our world is the Player, not the language.
Of course you might argue that the flex framework is unparalleled with binding, repeaters, events, effects, etc. ... but isn't it opensource already?
But it took thousand and thousands of man-hours and a significant amount of people to develop the framework and to support it. I challenge anyone to attempt to do the same. If there is a business case to be made for another tool that can match the capabilities of the Flex framework, then by all means. Have fun writing 200k of relatively bug-free code. :)
And what about LCS??
It's supported, it's backed by the thought leaders on the technology. Sure, a team of very smart developers could put together a similar offering, but they sure couldn't support it the same and they would always be playing catch-up to those that are developing the technology in the first place.
Adobe is the thought leader and the first adopter.
If part of the player is OS ( correct me is im wrong ), the framework is OS, and now we can port code and run it in Flash... what's left for Adobe to profit from? Perhaps acrobat...? or Media Server? ( oh.. red5 ).
The Player is not open source. It's a closed, licensed model. Another very important point is that, from my understanding, it's against all EULAs to write your own Player - write a public SWF runtime and they'll sue you. :) It's a closed market and it's highly unlikely to change soon.
To a certain degree, Adobe might be shooting themselves in the foot with this one.
I don't think they are really. Adobe is a huge company. They control the Player, which is a necessary evil now they've gotten this far with the technology.
The Flex line of products is a very small portion of Adobe's revenue. The Flash IDE is way more ingrained in the market than a niche tool like Flex.
Their real focus on this stuff is the entire enterprise process and workflow. Their analyst meeting documents are always a great read and give some pretty good insight into where they are positioned. Stuff like that Quake technology demo are to keep us happy, imho (and they did a dang good job!), but It's miniscule in the grand scheme of what Adobe does.
In the end, it's a code converter. Anyone outside of Adobe could've done it - they just did it first. Glad they're still the thought leaders.
cheers, jon
