Adobe has offered control over its Flex development platform for Flash-based web applications to open source governance body the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).
The news comes a week after Adobe announced that it will no longer be developing the Flash multimedia platform for use on mobile devices. The announcement was seen as a vindication of the late Apple CEO Steve Job’s antipathy towards Flash.
Adobe said yesterday that it is "preparing two proposals for incubating Flex SDK and [associated messaging technology] BlazeDS at the Apache Software Foundation".
Adobe made a similar offer to Apache for goverance of PhoneGap, the HTML applicaiton development platform, after it acquired the company behind the platform, Nitobi, in October.
Flex, which has been open source since 2008, is a software development kit which lets developers build web applications that run on Flash. Adobe said that it would continue to support the SDK in a number of ways, including a full-time development team at Adobe and continued support for Flex developed applications.
Adobe said that HTML5 was the best technology for web application development "in the long run", but that Flex still has advantages such a: "complete feature-level consistency across multiple platforms", "a mature [programming] language, suitable for large application development", and a suite of supporting tools.
"In time (and depending upon your application, it could be 3-5 years from now), we believe HTML5 could support the majority of use cases where Flex is used today," Adobe said.
