Ten Questions with Adobe's Matt Chotin

Before we get into some of the Flex 4 SDK questions, on December 14th, 2009, Adobe released the Flex 3.5 SDK. Can you tell us a little about that build? What's changed there that we need to know about?

3.5 is a minor update release that was primarily about fixing some bugs (especially an annoying one that we introduced in 3.4 with responders on services). Our updates in the 3.x branch have really slowed down as we focus on Flex 4 so I expect it to remain relatively stable. We're not planning to push another update on the 3.x branch until after Flex 4 ships, so we hope this is a good build to carry Flex 3 developers for a while.

It is really great, while challenging, to be able to use the Flex 4 SDK as it is being developed. Having access to the Flash Builder 4 Public Betas has also been helpful. How do you feel that this "openness" has positively and negatively effected Adobe's development process? Are there things that you see now that you would have changed if you could?

I think that overall our public development model has been working really well, though there are always things we could improve. It’s been good to try to have the developers be rigorous in keeping specifications updated and having them posted on the open source site. Of course as we get later into the cycle we tend not to update them, so they do go a little stale, and that can be frustrating for users who are just coming across Flex 4 now. But we of course have to balance that with things like the actual documentation and fixing bugs :-) Having the forums where folks can ask questions about what we’re doing or submit their ideas has also been good. Just recently we checked in a performance improvement suggested by someone in the community, and it may be giving us a 10% (or more) runtime boost across the board on most apps! And a while back someone provided some good architectural suggestions on how we should do the DropDownList, which we ended up taking as well.

I don't think those would be possible if the source wasn’t updated continuously and we weren’t getting builds out there. At the same time there are frustrations when folks ask about decisions that we already spent hours debating internally. It can be difficult to explain the hard choices and trade-offs that we’re making over email, we probably spent a few hours in meetings over them already. Sometimes you just want to say "trust us, we know what we're doing." And I think for the most part you can trust the decisions that we make. But you can also point to a few where our original decisions may have been FxMisguided ;-)