Adobe Flex components as MyFaces JSF components

[Jihoon Kim]

Hi!

I was hoping if someone can take a look at a recent contribution that
I have made to the sandbox and see if it is something that I should
spend more of my free time with=>
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250

I have detailed much about the contribution within the Jira, but in a
nutshell it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex
components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the
components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create
the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the
components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and
etcetera.

One caveat is that users will need to download the free Adobe Flex SDK
to C:\Program Files\flexSDK or /usr/local/bin/flexSDK [haven't tested
on linux yet].

I thought it would be an interesting set of components and if it is
something that seems to have some potential I will fine tune the code
more and give additional capabilities within the components. I have
tried to keep to some of the standards within the myfaces project by
including tons of .xml files for tld attributes and have attached a
patch for set of files and a zip for others [since there exists
multiple directories and files within them].

Thank you!!!

--
Sincerely,

Ji Hoon Kim

[Simon Kitching]

Hi,

Jihoon Kim schrieb:

> Hi!
>
> I was hoping if someone can take a look at a recent contribution that
> I have made to the sandbox and see if it is something that I should
> spend more of my free time with=>
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250
>
> I have detailed much about the contribution within the Jira, but in a
> nutshell it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex
> components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the
> components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create
> the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the
> components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and
> etcetera.
>
> One caveat is that users will need to download the free Adobe Flex SDK
> to C:\Program Files\flexSDK or /usr/local/bin/flexSDK [haven't tested
> on linux yet].
>
> I thought it would be an interesting set of components and if it is
> something that seems to have some potential I will fine tune the code
> more and give additional capabilities within the components. I have
> tried to keep to some of the standards within the myfaces project by
> including tons of .xml files for tld attributes and have attached a
> patch for set of files and a zip for others [since there exists
> multiple directories and files within them].
>  

Thanks very much for offering this code to the myfaces project.

I had a quick look yesterday, and the code seems to be very nicely
written. I'm sure it will be useful to many people.

Before this becomes part of a MyFaces project, however, there are a few
questions to answer:
a) Abobe flex is a proprietary product. Therefore, is a wrapper for it
suitable as an ASF project?
b) Does the code comply with the ASF legal rules regarding licensing?
c) Is there a large enough development community to keep this code
maintained?
d) What project should the code be included in?

== (a)

The ASF always uses the Apache License 2.0 (AL2.0). This is meant to be
a "business friendly" license, in that code under this license can be
included in proprietory products. However in general the ASF does try to
promote open source over proprietory products.

As far as I know, Flex is completely proprietory to Adobe, and this
wrapper code has no other purpose than allowing this proprietory code to
be used. Therefore I'm not sure that it is in the spirit of ASF to host
it here.

== (b)

The ASF has a strict rule that no code hosted in the apache svn
repository can contain
   import some.gpl.api

I'm reasonably sure that the same rule bans "import" of packages whose
license is not compatible with AL2.0.

I can't see any such calls in the provided code; it seems that the code
just outputs HTML statements that happen to reference Flex plugins
(which would probably be ok). Can you confirm that nowhere in the java
code are any "import" statements of adobe java libs?

== (c)

The ASF differs from sourceforge, etc., in that it is serious about
long-term maintenance of the projects it hosts. This means ensuring that
there before any code becomes an official ASF project it has a group of
people willing to maintain it. Are there other people who are willing to
keep this code valid, and respond to bugreports etc?

== (d)

The patch is written so that the code is part of the Tomahawk project.
However I don't think this would be the best place for it. The people
who use tomahawk will not usually want this code, and the people who
want this code will often not want the rest of tomahawk.

And in addition, I personally would like to see tomahawk put into
"maintenance only" mode, with the best bits being moved instead into the
new "myfaces commons" modules.


==

Please don't take this as a rejection; this is just my initial thoughts.
Hopefully other people will comment as well. As most of the developers
on this list are very busy it may take a week or so for people to get
around to evaluating such a large chunk of code.

Note that even if the consensus is that this code is not appropriate for
MyFaces or Apache, it still looks very useful and we would all wish you
success with the project no matter where it gets hosted.

Regards,
Simon

[Hazem Saleh]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Simon Kitching <skitching@...> wrote:

Hi,

Jihoon Kim schrieb:

> Hi!
>
> I was hoping if someone can take a look at a recent contribution that
> I have made to the sandbox and see if it is something that I should
> spend more of my free time with=>
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250
>
> I have detailed much about the contribution within the Jira, but in a
> nutshell it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex
> components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the
> components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create
> the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the
> components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and
> etcetera.
>
> One caveat is that users will need to download the free Adobe Flex SDK
> to C:\Program Files\flexSDK or /usr/local/bin/flexSDK [haven't tested
> on linux yet].
>
> I thought it would be an interesting set of components and if it is
> something that seems to have some potential I will fine tune the code
> more and give additional capabilities within the components. I have
> tried to keep to some of the standards within the myfaces project by
> including tons of .xml files for tld attributes and have attached a
> patch for set of files and a zip for others [since there exists
> multiple directories and files within them].
>

Thanks very much for offering this code to the myfaces project.

I had a quick look yesterday, and the code seems to be very nicely
written. I'm sure it will be useful to many people.

Before this becomes part of a MyFaces project, however, there are a few
questions to answer:
a) Abobe flex is a proprietary product. Therefore, is a wrapper for it
suitable as an ASF project?
b) Does the code comply with the ASF legal rules regarding licensing?
c) Is there a large enough development community to keep this code
maintained?
d) What project should the code be included in?

== (a)

The ASF always uses the Apache License 2.0 (AL2.0). This is meant to be
a "business friendly" license, in that code under this license can be
included in proprietory products. However in general the ASF does try to
promote open source over proprietory products.

As far as I know, Flex is completely proprietory to Adobe, and this
wrapper code has no other purpose than allowing this proprietory code to
be used. Therefore I'm not sure that it is in the spirit of ASF to host
it here.

== (b)

The ASF has a strict rule that no code hosted in the apache svn
repository can contain
  import some.gpl.api

I'm reasonably sure that the same rule bans "import" of packages whose
license is not compatible with AL2.0.

I can't see any such calls in the provided code; it seems that the code
just outputs HTML statements that happen to reference Flex plugins
(which would probably be ok). Can you confirm that nowhere in the java
code are any "import" statements of adobe java libs?

== (c)

The ASF differs from sourceforge, etc., in that it is serious about
long-term maintenance of the projects it hosts. This means ensuring that
there before any code becomes an official ASF project it has a group of
people willing to maintain it. Are there other people who are willing to
keep this code valid, and respond to bugreports etc?

== (d)

The patch is written so that the code is part of the Tomahawk project.
However I don't think this would be the best place for it. The people
who use tomahawk will not usually want this code, and the people who
want this code will often not want the rest of tomahawk.

And in addition, I personally would like to see tomahawk put into
"maintenance only" mode, with the best bits being moved instead into the
new "myfaces commons" modules.


==

Please don't take this as a rejection; this is just my initial thoughts.
Hopefully other people will comment as well. As most of the developers
on this list are very busy it may take a week or so for people to get
around to evaluating such a large chunk of code.

Note that even if the consensus is that this code is not appropriate for
MyFaces or Apache, it still looks very useful and we would all wish you
success with the project no matter where it gets hosted.

Regards,
Simon

I think we haven't any problems with the Adobe Flex licence, it is (MPL) :
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source#License
http://people.apache.org/~rubys/3party.html

--
Hazem Ahmed Saleh Ahmed
http://www.jroller.com/page/HazemBlog

[Hazem Saleh]

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Hazem Saleh <hazem.saleh@...> wrote:

On Thu, May 8, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Simon Kitching <skitching@...> wrote:

Hi,

Jihoon Kim schrieb:

> Hi!
>
> I was hoping if someone can take a look at a recent contribution that
> I have made to the sandbox and see if it is something that I should
> spend more of my free time with=>
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250
>
> I have detailed much about the contribution within the Jira, but in a
> nutshell it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex
> components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the
> components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create
> the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the
> components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and
> etcetera.
>
> One caveat is that users will need to download the free Adobe Flex SDK
> to C:\Program Files\flexSDK or /usr/local/bin/flexSDK [haven't tested
> on linux yet].
>
> I thought it would be an interesting set of components and if it is
> something that seems to have some potential I will fine tune the code
> more and give additional capabilities within the components. I have
> tried to keep to some of the standards within the myfaces project by
> including tons of .xml files for tld attributes and have attached a
> patch for set of files and a zip for others [since there exists
> multiple directories and files within them].
>

Thanks very much for offering this code to the myfaces project.

I had a quick look yesterday, and the code seems to be very nicely
written. I'm sure it will be useful to many people.

Before this becomes part of a MyFaces project, however, there are a few
questions to answer:
a) Abobe flex is a proprietary product. Therefore, is a wrapper for it
suitable as an ASF project?
b) Does the code comply with the ASF legal rules regarding licensing?
c) Is there a large enough development community to keep this code
maintained?
d) What project should the code be included in?

== (a)

The ASF always uses the Apache License 2.0 (AL2.0). This is meant to be
a "business friendly" license, in that code under this license can be
included in proprietory products. However in general the ASF does try to
promote open source over proprietory products.

As far as I know, Flex is completely proprietory to Adobe, and this
wrapper code has no other purpose than allowing this proprietory code to
be used. Therefore I'm not sure that it is in the spirit of ASF to host
it here.

== (b)

The ASF has a strict rule that no code hosted in the apache svn
repository can contain
  import some.gpl.api

I'm reasonably sure that the same rule bans "import" of packages whose
license is not compatible with AL2.0.

I can't see any such calls in the provided code; it seems that the code
just outputs HTML statements that happen to reference Flex plugins
(which would probably be ok). Can you confirm that nowhere in the java
code are any "import" statements of adobe java libs?

== (c)

The ASF differs from sourceforge, etc., in that it is serious about
long-term maintenance of the projects it hosts. This means ensuring that
there before any code becomes an official ASF project it has a group of
people willing to maintain it. Are there other people who are willing to
keep this code valid, and respond to bugreports etc?

== (d)

The patch is written so that the code is part of the Tomahawk project.
However I don't think this would be the best place for it. The people
who use tomahawk will not usually want this code, and the people who
want this code will often not want the rest of tomahawk.

And in addition, I personally would like to see tomahawk put into
"maintenance only" mode, with the best bits being moved instead into the
new "myfaces commons" modules.


==

Please don't take this as a rejection; this is just my initial thoughts.
Hopefully other people will comment as well. As most of the developers
on this list are very busy it may take a week or so for people to get
around to evaluating such a large chunk of code.

Note that even if the consensus is that this code is not appropriate for
MyFaces or Apache, it still looks very useful and we would all wish you
success with the project no matter where it gets hosted.

Regards,
Simon

I think we haven't any problems with the Adobe Flex licence, it is (MPL) :
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source#License
http://people.apache.org/~rubys/3party.html

--
Hazem Ahmed Saleh Ahmed
http://www.jroller.com/page/HazemBlog

I totally support Ji Hoon idea, and I think we can improve alot in the future.

--
Hazem Ahmed Saleh Ahmed
http://www.jroller.com/page/HazemBlog

[Jihoon Kim]

Thanks to both for your responses and feedbacks and I will try to
answer some of the questions regarding the contribution.

(a)
Adobe Flex has been open sourced through MPL [as noted in a previous
thread]. But since I still wanted to be cautious; I have asked the
users to download the free Adobe Flex SDK when using these components.

(b)
It is true that the contribution relies on Adobe Flex's SDK in
compiling the mxml file to swf file and that the contribution is
inherently dependent upon Flex, but the idea and desire for this
contribution is to glue Adobe Flex to JavaServer Faces components.
This way:
    (1)  Users can still perform the binding of data to managed beans
on the server side for their RIA.
    (2)  Users can include swf into their regular applications without
performing anything outside of Java.
    (3)  Users can create apps with mixture of Flash, JavaScript, and
HTML with absolute abstraction.

Also, since it generates the preMxml, Mxml, and SWF files to the
directories, debugging is made easy.

(c)
I assume that the group which will maintain this code will increase in
number, because personally I think it to be one of the areas that has
a lot of potential and do think that it will be able to bring a lot of
additional ideas to the project. For example, I initially wanted to
create components that detect the browser setting and either direct
application to components based on Dojo or Adobe Flex, but thought
this would be better for separation and perhaps in the future there
could be components that performs this action.

(d)
As for this one, I was hoping if I could get some feedback on where
the contribution should be placed at, if it is to be accepted.

Anyway, thanks to both as I appreciate the feedback!!!

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Jihoon Kim <jihoonkim1004@...> wrote:

> Hi!
>
> I was hoping if someone can take a look at a recent contribution that
> I have made to the sandbox and see if it is something that I should
> spend more of my free time with=>
> https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/TOMAHAWK-1250
>
> I have detailed much about the contribution within the Jira, but in a
> nutshell it is to give users capability in creating Adobe Flex
> components as MyFaces JSF components. So users would create the
> components as normal JSF components and the contribution will create
> the necessary SWF files and etcetera and link the values of the
> components back to the managed beans using JSON+Javascript and
> etcetera.
>
> One caveat is that users will need to download the free Adobe Flex SDK
> to C:\Program Files\flexSDK or /usr/local/bin/flexSDK [haven't tested
> on linux yet].
>
> I thought it would be an interesting set of components and if it is
> something that seems to have some potential I will fine tune the code
> more and give additional capabilities within the components. I have
> tried to keep to some of the standards within the myfaces project by
> including tons of .xml files for tld attributes and have attached a
> patch for set of files and a zip for others [since there exists
> multiple directories and files within them].
>
> Thank you!!!
>
> --
> Sincerely,
>
> Ji Hoon Kim
>

--
Sincerely,

Ji Hoon Kim

[grantsmith]

(c)
I assume that the group which will maintain this code will increase in
number, because personally I think it to be one of the areas that has
a lot of potential and do think that it will be able to bring a lot of
additional ideas to the project. For example, I initially wanted to
create components that detect the browser setting and either direct
application to components based on Dojo or Adobe Flex, but thought
this would be better for separation and perhaps in the future there
could be components that performs this action.

I agree with this. The work I'm involved with privately is increasingly interested in Flex. This would be a good bridging opportunity for MyFaces.

--
Grant Smith

Hi,

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 13:39 -0700, Jihoon Kim wrote:
> Thanks to both for your responses and feedbacks and I will try to
> answer some of the questions regarding the contribution.
>
> (a)
> Adobe Flex has been open sourced through MPL [as noted in a previous
> thread]. But since I still wanted to be cautious; I have asked the
> users to download the free Adobe Flex SDK when using these components.

It does appear that the "flex sdk" itself is indeed open source.

But in the end, flex is just a way to drive a Flash implementation, yes?
And AFAIK the only flash player that exists which Flex can drive is a
binary download from Adobe.

Am I wrong? I'm certainly no expert in this area..

It appears that the MPL license is also a little tricky to deal with.
I'm no expert here, but here's a link to some (draft) ASF policy:
  http://people.apache.org/~rubys/3party.html

>
> (b)
> It is true that the contribution relies on Adobe Flex's SDK in
> compiling the mxml file to swf file and that the contribution is
> inherently dependent upon Flex, but the idea and desire for this
> contribution is to glue Adobe Flex to JavaServer Faces components.
> This way:
>     (1)  Users can still perform the binding of data to managed beans
> on the server side for their RIA.
>     (2)  Users can include swf into their regular applications without
> performing anything outside of Java.
>     (3)  Users can create apps with mixture of Flash, JavaScript, and
> HTML with absolute abstraction.
>
> Also, since it generates the preMxml, Mxml, and SWF files to the
> directories, debugging is made easy.

I'm not disagreeing with your goal or architecture. If Flex can be
encapsulated as a component-set or renderkit for jsf, then that would
certainly be useful for some people.

But the ASF is not the only place in the world where JSF-related
development occurs. The question is whether this project would benefit
by being within the ASF, and whether the ASF would benefit by hosting
this project.


> (c)
> I assume that the group which will maintain this code will increase in
> number, because personally I think it to be one of the areas that has
> a lot of potential and do think that it will be able to bring a lot of
> additional ideas to the project. For example, I initially wanted to
> create components that detect the browser setting and either direct
> application to components based on Dojo or Adobe Flex, but thought
> this would be better for separation and perhaps in the future there
> could be components that performs this action.

This code is not really just a patch to an existing project; it is quite
a lot of code and requires specific knowledge to maintain. So IMO it
needs to be treated like a separate project within myfaces.

The problem is that it's not possible to accept a project, publish it on
an ASF site as an official ASF project, then hope developers join. If
they don't then the ASF is left with a project that it cannot maintain,
and that damages our reputation.

If a project can find half-a-dozen people, not all employed by the same
company, including some existing apache committers, then that would
probably be enough to qualify as a "sustainable" development community.

Otherwise, there is a special area within the ASF called "the incubator"
where projects can start and try to build the necessary community to
become an "official" project. See:
   incubator.apache.org

Would you mind telling us why you wrote this code? Is it a personal
project (you just thought it would be cool), or are you planning to
commercially offer related services, or is this sponsored by some
specific company? Note that commercial reasons are not a problem; Oracle
are a major contributor to Trinidad for example.


> (d)
> As for this one, I was hoping if I could get some feedback on where
> the contribution should be placed at, if it is to be accepted.

I would suggest that the best place would be as a new subproject, like
"orchestra" or "portlet bridge" are. It would definitely belong in the
MyFaces family (rather than anywhere else in Apache) but I don't think
it fits as part of Tomahawk. As I noted earlier, people who use tomahawk
won't always want Flex, and people who want Flex won't always want the
other tomahawk components.

It could also be a new "myfaces commons" module, but we haven't really
figured out how to structure those anyway. And it isn't really a "common
module", but a component library just like tomahawk is.

Regards,
Simon

[Jihoon Kim]

Since I will have to spend more time reading upon license issue, not
my known area, I will answer the simple question first.

> Would you mind telling us why you wrote this code? Is it a personal
> project (you just thought it would be cool), or are you planning to
> commercially offer related services, or is this sponsored by some
> specific company? Note that commercial reasons are not a problem; Oracle
> are a major contributor to Trinidad for example.

The code was written because :
      (1)  like you said, I thought it would be cool and interesting
      (2)  I wanted to write code that integrated other technology, so
thought it would be fun and it was!!! =]

So in a nutshell [boy I use this phrase a lot], it was written as a hobby.

--
Sincerely,

Ji Hoon Kim

[Hazem Saleh]

On Fri, May 9, 2008 at 12:08 AM, Grant Smith <work.grant@...> wrote:

(c)
I assume that the group which will maintain this code will increase in
number, because personally I think it to be one of the areas that has
a lot of potential and do think that it will be able to bring a lot of
additional ideas to the project. For example, I initially wanted to
create components that detect the browser setting and either direct
application to components based on Dojo or Adobe Flex, but thought
this would be better for separation and perhaps in the future there
could be components that performs this action.

I agree with this. The work I'm involved with privately is increasingly interested in Flex. This would be a good bridging opportunity for MyFaces.

--
Grant Smith

I totally agree with Grant words.
--
Hazem Ahmed Saleh Ahmed
http://www.jroller.com/page/HazemBlog