Tech Per

Here we go again, with a little rant about Adobe and their half-way openness in flex.

They keep shouting about flex being open source, which is true, sort of. I mean, it is, but there are components in it, that are not. Take the new flex3, for instance. If you browse the flex3 SDK apidocs (and remember, the SDK is free), it includes apidocs for the AdvancedDataGrid component. A component I have been waiting eagerly to try, because the existing DataGrid component is a bit too basic. But, when you try to actually use that component, the compiled application will show like this image:

So, it is in the sdk docs, but it is not in the free distribution. Irritating, at best. After a bit of googling, I found this blogpost about changes in the flex licensing model. It turns out, that charting components, OLAPDataGrid and AdvancedDataGrid has been chunked together as the “Flex Data Visualization” package. Okay, maybe I can understand having to pay for a charting component, and I can understand OLAPDataGrid too, as it is kind of specialized. But AdvancedDataGrid, … come on. This has to be there, and it has to be part of the open and free package.

What’s more is, that it appears, that you can only get access to the “Data Visualization” package, if you buy a license for Flex Builder 3, the IDE from Adobe based on Eclipse. What the f***. I don’t want an IDE pressed down my throat, just to get access to an AdvancedDataGrid.