Flex: Flash app platform becomes Apache top-level project

Adobe's Flex software for developing rich cross-platform Flash applications, which was contributed to the Apache Software Foundation a year ago, has now graduated from the Foundation's incubator and become a top-level project. New projects at Apache spend time in the incubator adapting to the "Apache way" under the guidance of mentors who teach how to run an Apache project.

Flex was created as an application development platform for deploying applications using Flash Player in browsers, AIR on desktops or, using Adobe tools, native applications on a number of mobile platforms. Flex was initially developed at Macromedia who were then acquired by Adobe. It uses MXML to define layout and ActionScript 3 to define logic. Flex 3's SDK was released under the Mozilla Public Licence in 2008. After some friction in 2009 and confusion in 2011, Adobe decided to contribute the Flex SDK to the Apache Software Foundation and in December 2011 it was accepted into the Apache incubator. In July 2012, the project made its first release from within the incubator, and after a vote taken in December by the Apache board, has now graduated to become a top-level project.

Accompanying that promotion, the Flex developers have released Apache Flex 4.9. The new version includes various bug fixes and improves internationalisation with new Australian, British, Canadian, Greek, Switzerland (German) and Portuguese localisations. The SDK is now able to work with a wider range of Flash Player versions and new VectorList and VectorCollection classes have been added, along with PostalCode formatters and validators. There are also updates to the Text Layout Framework, which is now also bundled in the SDK, and the SDK can be compiled using Java 7. Further details are available in the release notes and the SDK and Installer are available to download under an Apache Licence.

(djwm)