Flex Builder 3 for Linux on hold
Yesterday, 21st of April, Ben Forta came to London to give a talk about ColdFusion 9 new features. It was really good session, Ben demoed all new major ones. Integration with Hibernate, new Adobe AIR ColdFusion services and of course brand new ColdFusion IDE codenamed Bolt (which does look pretty solid by the way) were most exciting.
After the talk I managed to ask Ben if he knows what is going on with Flex Builder 3 for Linux. The answer was not what I was expecting to hear. Unfortunately the project is currently on hold. Quoting Ben there is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development
.
Without a doubt this is really bad news for anyone who invested in infrastructure for building AIR and Flex applications on Linux, it may happen that we are going to stay without the tools. I still believe that Adobe is going to rethink its decision. If they could only fix this one issue: debugger keeps disconnecting from the debugging session… I think most of the developers would be happy then.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:56 am
Coor ! That’s really bad news :-(
Please vote on http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053 and lets see if we can make the difference.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Oh, finally managed logging in to my Adobe Bugs account.
Voted.
Time to log one more issue.
April 28th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
When Ben says ‘not enough requisition’ what did he mean ?
Adobe can not know how many people bought the PC or Mac version of Builder and then stuck the licence on a Linux box…
April 28th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Tom, That is the problem, I think no one knows. But on Adobe Forums it becomes very clear how many people does that.If Adobe AIR/Flex is trully cross-platform it should have a tool support as well. I am not sure if Flex SDK is enough. Flex Builder is based on Eclipse, Eclipse is cross-platform. So what are the serious issues causing Flex Builder being so hard to port to Linux? I thinnk many people would maybe understand postponing the project if they could hear what exactly happened.
I don’t think we need (I know some people really want the feature) visual designer. Flex Builder in its current form – code completion, code coloring, full support for latest frameworks – is just fine. The only problem is the debugger.
April 29th, 2009 at 10:46 pm
For what its worth the following issue disappeared for me when I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04. This was a nagging issue for me but seems to be cleared up after the upgrade (at least for me that is). If it is just a matter of some library causing the issue I would think most Linux folks would happily upgrade said library if it could be narrowed down to the specific one.
“issue: debugger keeps disconnecting from the debugging session.”
April 29th, 2009 at 11:01 pm
@Lance: I have to admit I have not yet used the debugger after updating to 9.04 but I will definitely take a look. Thank you for the info.
April 30th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Adobe failing to support Flex on Linux would seriously jeopardize my current project, and probably force me to Java.
I might well give up on Flex developing altogether, as I don’t intend to support Windows at home.
really bad news…
John
May 19th, 2009 at 7:36 am
Looking at the growing development in linux rather than in windows,
Adobe must support LINUX for FLEX.
Lalit.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:08 am
When Microsoft is pushing silverlight so hard. Adobe’s trump card could have been its true cross platform support both for the VM and build tools.
And @radekg i agree the keyboard fanatic coders from linux world :) are happy with the builder as it is now. But to make the UI look better we need the design view as well.
And everyone please vote on this link to help continue the work.
August 24th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Hi,
I would be a happy programmer if I could use Flash Builder on linux. I don’t mean wine it but complete port.
In Portugal a lot of companies are porting their systems to Linux, and Java, it would be very nice if they could develop in Linux.
I’m working on a project porting 16456 asp pages, and 75 Webservices C# to Java, it would be very nice to have a front-end in Flex. But they don’t have Windows desktops anymore, so Flash Builder or Flex Builder (they don’t want to use alpha versions), so flex wasn’t evaluated as front-end framework.
October 6th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
This is extremely disappointing. My linux-based company has spent a lot of time working with flex in our RIAs. If Adobe is abandoning linux, we may have to abandon Adobe and go with a javascript based solution instead.
December 14th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
[...] 首先BS下Adobe，TNND为什么FlashBuilder 4就没有Linux的支持，原来的Flex Builder for Linux竟然也给毙掉了，难道我们这些在Linux下的Flex开发人员就不是您的客户了？！ [...]