RodeWorks

Now don’t get me wrong, I love open source products.  But sometime all these “free” apps make me a little cranky.

One big concern is they are not really free — sure they’re free from a purchase cost, but as light weight as they appear at first glance there is a very real cost to installation, configuration, training, implementation, data conversion, maintenance and ultimately switching to something else.   So  while there is a temptation to jump with the “flavor of the month” I find myself getting a little more cautious, and starting to add consideration of commercial products in my thoughts.

For instance I’m at an Adobe CS3 conference here in NYC, and the morning session was on creating Rich Client Web Applications.  Now I know these vendor-run events are really just one long sales pitch, so one needs to keep on their guard and not fall victim to the hype.  The session mostly focused on Flex 3.  The Flex framework is basically a way to develop Flash application in a programming interface (which will be comfortable to programmers) instead on in the Flash app itself.  You still need something running on the server to handle the chores of  accessing a database and other server-side stuff.  But with Flex you get a tool kit to handle the client-brower presentation stuff in very powerful, and straightforward ways.  Its all stuff that is possible to do with PHP, Javascript, and the whole AJAX type thing, but its all in a nice, neat, vendor supported package.  I’ve been looking at all sorts of frameworks to use with PHP, but its tough to decide which one to pick.  Questions such as how active its user community is, what’s the future going to bring, what documentation/training is available, etc.  are all critical to making an adoption decision — and for most projects these are tough to figure out.  I know Adobe’s reputation, and know what I can count on.  I know Flex is a big new push, and probably will be around for a while.   While it may not play well with other Adobe programs yet, I know I can count on that happening over time.  So Flex is a pretty attractive solution, and one I’ll be looking into further.

Interestingly part of Flex utilizes an open source editor, Eclipse, so open source has its place.  But maybe this is the future?  A commercial vendor building and supporting open source, and adding the reputation, reliability, support, training and other value added elements.