Octopz, Flash and open source Flex

Let me introduce myself, Paul Nykamp (CTO) of Octopz. Today, Brian Lesser (our Chief Software Architect) and I were speaking about yesterday’s announcement from Adobe that Flex 3 will be open source. The announcement resulted in an amazing flurry of news articles and blog posts – so many in fact that neither of us will ever find time to read half of them.

Below are our thoughts on this subject and what it means to Octopz.

Some of Octopz’s most interesting features, such as the ability to show anyone at a remote location exactly the same thing that you see in real time, come from our use of Adobe Flash and Adobe’s Flash Media Server.

In simple terms we decided to build key parts of our software using Adobe’s Flash platform as a foundation. In some ways it was an obvious choice for us. Flash Media Server not only provides a way to stream real-time audio and video, but provides an elegant way to share data in real time. (It’s the magic behind real-time document markup.) But in other ways it wasn’t so obvious. Should a relatively small company like Octopz trust Adobe to provide us with a solid software foundation? Are Flash and Flash Media server extensible enough for us to do all the things Octopz needs to do going forward?

Technorati Tags: adobe, flash, flex, Octopz, opensource, apollo, RIA, SaaS, software

Of course not everything we do is based on Adobe products. Our document conversion and media conversion engines, our database, and other parts of Octopz aren’t built on Adobe products. But everything you see is touched by Adobe’s technology at one point or another.

What does yesterday’s announcement about open source Flex from Adobe mean for Octopz?

Octopz was already well down the path of redeveloping the client-side of our application using Flex when the news broke. (Flex is a more powerful way of developing complex applications that run in the Flash player.) For us the news just confirms what we already knew: Adobe has made a strong long-term and strategic commitment to providing people like us with the tools we need to build cutting-edge applications. Now, we’re not saying using Adobe’s technology to build Octopz means Octopz is automatically a cutting-edge application. You can judge for yourself how good Octopz is. (And, we’d love to know what you think about it!) But we are saying the announcement is consistent with everything Adobe has been doing since it acquired Macromedia and Flash. Here are some recent examples:

1. Adobe Labs http://labs.adobe.com hosts other open source projects and lots of prerelease software.
2. Tamarin at http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ is Adobe’s contribution to the Mozilla project.
3. Adobe is using the open source Webkit engine (http://webkit.org/) in their Apollo project and contributing back to Webkit.

You can see more about Adobe’s open source work, including other projects at: http://opensource.adobe.com/

So, the recent announcement, that Flex is going open source is part of a longer story. For us it means that Adobe is providing us with more options. Open source Flex means we get to see Flex evolve in real-time as Adobe’s developers work on it. That means we’re better informed and can make plans earlier about how Octopz should evolve. It means we can fix bugs ourselves immediately without waiting for Adobe. It means we can work with Adobe’s tools and code in ways that we couldn’t before. And as a small company it means we can be more agile. We’re really happy about that.

What do we plan to do with Flex and later releases of Octopz? We’re getting a lot of requests from large enterprises for integration with various content management systems, other folks want more content management features inside Octopz. So we’re working on both. We’ve always planned on providing more structured review and approval features. We will start work on including workflow features soon. And of course there are lots of enhancements we’re planning with regard to markup and new media types.

Now that we’ve opened up our online service we’re really anxious to hear what new features you would like to see in Octopz. We are looking forward to seeing your suggestions. Please leave your comments here.

-Paul Nykamp and Brian Lesser