Adode says "No 64-bit Flash"! GNU,GPL say "yes!"

Adode has been in the recieving end of criticisms lately, as they were not moving a step forward to support 64bit platforms for the flash player. Their recommendation is to install a 32-bit browser and use the 32-bit flash player, definitely not acceptable at any means. This has especially haunted the 64-bit Linux users, as most of the distros comes bundled with 64-bit browsers. Despite various online petitions and forum posts, Adobe is still not making a move towards the future.
But the crisis has almost come to and end with Open Source flash players for both Linux and Windows. The first step towards this was the GplFlash project started when there were no Flash player at all for Linux, and lost its importance once Macromedia released a 32-bit Flash player. But with the 64-bit issue propping up, the project was revived in 2005 and this was called GplFlash2, but it seems GplFlash2 has been stopped due to messy code, and it seems new design would be adopted. So there is no chance of it being released in the near future.
But, GNU has done their part to help the 64-bit users with Gnash project which is nothing but GNU Flash project. This is fully supported and is a full fledged player that supports the Mozilla based browsers, such as firefox. So now anyone can view their favourite Flash websites without the Adobe's proprietery Flash player. Gnash supports upto swf v7.0, which is a good news. but the bad news is that there is no Windows based binary for Gnash, though there is one for GplFlash1.
Here is the Gnash ftp download link.
Here is the Gnash homepage.
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Adobe Flex...redefining the web

Once Adobe bought Macromedia, it was looking out to make the most out of the deal. And as everyone knows Macromedia's flagship product is Flash, and almost 80% of today's browsers are Flash enabled. Now the drawback with Flash was, it was good for animations and intros, but it's loosely held at the back by a language called Actionscript. It was not a powerful tool to employ databases and other deep web applications.
Now Adobe knew this very well and they were straight onto business when they released the first version of Adobe Flex, in March 2004 which combines the power of Flash with a coventional programming model. It includes support for major technologies like cold fusion, Java etc. it is used to develop Rich Internet Applications.
Flex uses Actionscript 3.0 and MXML(Macromedia XML) for coding. It's compiled using JIT compiler to produce swf files on the fly. Flex can be considered as the direct competitor to AJAX, OpenLazlo etc.
Flex can add more eye-candy to your web application without losing the strong connectivity capabilities. It's already used by major players like SAP, Harley-Davidson etc to build there website.
But all good things comes with a price and so does Flex. The flex builder which is the IDE to build flex apps, is based on Eclipse. There is also two other priced modules are Flex Data services and Flex Charting. The latter is used to create highly customized charts and graphs and the former for providing addition services for managing data. The Flex SDK, though is free of cost and can be downloaded from the Adobe website. It provides the Command line compiler, debugger and the libraries.
Flex is here to stay, or atleast that is what Adode thinks, take a look at this Flex based website to judge for yourself. http://harley-davidson.com
Latest Flex release : Flex 2.0
Manufacturer : Adobe
You can download flex SDK here
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