Now presenting the alpha of the Flex Builder IDE on Linux! (this was announced at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference). You can now create Flex projects, write code with intellisense-like hinting, compile and debug all within an IDE based on Eclipse, on Linux. You heard it right, it’s officially supported by Adobe. Download it NOW.

The future direction of Flex Builder on Linux depends mostly on community feedback. Yes, seriously. So please do write in your feedback even if it is just “works well” or “it sucks”. Why is this important? The more the feedback, the more thought will be given to the product. This is how things work in Adobe (as far as I’ve seen). So again, voice your opinion on what you think of Flex Builder on Linux, and what you’d like to see and not see in it.

Disclosure: I am part of this project. I mostly handled the Linuxisms in the IDE functionality.

Update : Lots of feedback and comments (good to see that it’s mostly positive) on Digg, Slashdot and ZDNet. There’s also a video of the actual announcement put online by Peter Elst.

Good to hear that Sun is finally serious about dynamic languages on Java. It’s no secret that I don’t like Java. I don’t want to start a holy war here - it’s just simply my personal preference, I don’t like the ’smell’ and ‘feel’ of it. But it would be great to write stuff in Python and get it running on top of the Java platform. That would surely be good for everybody. It would make more sense if all the big corporates also tried using Jython or Groovy - it would lead to much happier and saner programmers and better products as well. Oh, and it’ll run on the Java platform.

Then again, I agree with Dumbill that the lack of activity on IronPython is discomforting.

Btw, don’t forget to read that first link - It must’ve been awesome to have Larry Wall (creator of Perl), Guido van Rossum (creator of Python), Dan Sugalski (Parrot) and Samuele Pedroni (Jython), James Strachan (Groovy) all in the same room and discussing dynamic languages!

Red Hat makes Eclipse go native using GNU ClassPath project!

Sun is going to open source Java!! - now this is something really cool. The one thing that immediately comes to mind is that all Linux distributions can start distributing Java in the CDs itself and more software can be written utilising Java. So it’s a win-win situation for both the open source community as well as Sun Microsystems as well. The flip side is that it may lead to incompatibility issues if there is forking of the JVM but I think this issue may not be as big. After all, there is only one Perl base code out there…

Update: Sun has not made a decision to open source Java