flex
a while ago, i came across an ad where bruce eckel was telling me that he was thinking in java, but now he is thinking in flex. since eckel's introductory "thinking in java" book layed the foundation of my object-oriented thinking, the ad actually made me visit adobe's flex site. however, the fact that everything around flex seemed so proprietary and expensive, made me leave the site pretty quickly.
a few days ago, adobe announced plans to open source flex, which of course made me look at it again.
in the meantime, i read eckel's blog entry about hybridizing java and i watched a video tutorial where he pairs up with adobe's james ward to create a simple but impressive flex app. it takes them 10 minutes to hack together some webservice-based code which fetches photos from flickr and displays them as a nice slideshow (of course they are re-using a lot of existing code, but that's fair enough).
it's all pretty cool: nice UIs, platform independent RIAs, open source. but someone probably needs to pay for all of that?! is adobe expecting to make big money with their 800$ IDE? i still don't see the big picture, but i will certainly play around with flex. if only just to find out what i won't be using in the future.
