Commercial Components for Flex
Author: Thomas Gonzalez
I just recently became aware of ILOG Elixir, which is a set of advanced data visualization components for Flex (Gauges/Dials, Maps, Treemaps Gantt, etc) that will be distributed and sold directly by Adobe for approximately $800. Last night I downloaded the beta to check them out, as we have already built several of the less complex components internally.
While I was impressed with the work that I know must have gone into building these components, I was less impressed with the end result on a couple of fronts. First, most of the components I looked at did not appear to be very extensible, at least on the surface. For instance their Gauge component came in one color, BLACK...., with no obvious property to alter the primary color. Admittedly I did not do a deep dive in the API, and I could be missing something here. The second area of disappointment was the lack of a polished UI and set of skins. The components seemed to be highly functional, but lacked the polish we are all coming to expect of commercial level UI that can be seen in most premier RIA and commercial OS like Leopard and Vista. Putting that polish on the components does not seem like it would be a lot of work normally, but when you take into account the lake of available properties in the API it could be a bit challenging.
What I found really interesting is that just this morning I discovered an open source effort that builds one of the more complex components in Elixir. It appears Josh Tynjala has released his own TreeMap component. On the surface this component looks every bit as good as the one offered by ILOG AND it is open source.
This begs the question: "Will we see more third party components developed commercially or via the community?" Coming from more of a closed source mindset (Microsoft) where there was a proliferation of commercial third party developer tools it is hard for me to evaluate. My experiences over the past couple years working with Flex, the team at Adobe, and the growing community tells me that more and more developer tools and components will be created via the community. Part of the reasoning here is that it is a cultural issue, the second part is that AS3 and Flex just make it sooo easy to do.
There are other complexities to this question, as it brings into question the viability of third party developer markets for Flex, which I think will be very strategic for Adobe to successfully penetrate the larger developer market. Microsoft has been very good at this, but they did so with a completely different set of cultural values (closed source proprietary.) I will be following this closely as the it could have a significant impact on the direction we take our business.
Thanks for the plug. Just wanted to add a thought. The Flash developer community has always been very good about sharing source code and helping others improve their work.
With that in mind, Flex is sort of a strange beast. Its audience is made up of many Flash experts moving over to the more developer-friendly land of Flex, along with other developers who come from more programming environments like Java and .NET that are looking for a more visually-appealing RIA environment. Flash pros are used to the open source atmosphere of Flash development, but the more traditional developers may or may not have the same sort of feelings towards it. This could be because they're used to the Microsoft world where proprietary is the way of things, or perhaps they've simply worked for highly restrictive companies that think open source is legally dangerous.
It'll be interesting to see how the community around Flex matures over time. Will open source stay strong? Probably, since there are many Flash folks who aren't interested in Flex who will keep on doing what they're doing. Will commercial Flex components become a decent business? Perhaps. So far, I've noticed little to indicate that they're gaining traction. However, bigger businesses are just entering the market and those that are scared of open source need to get their components somewhere. In-house development just isn't viable in all cases. Additionally, the implied or explicit support that comes with commercial components is very attractive to many who want a feeling of safety when they use code created by someone else.
Again, thanks for pointing out my treemap component to your readers. I first built it in 2006, and I did actually consider selling it at first. In the end, I decided that the community exposure from open sourcing it (and creating dialog through bug reports, feature requests, blog postings etc) would be just as, if not more, beneficial as receiving a small stream of revenue from sales. Never underestimate the power of name recognition.