The Astrolabe Project

I like Flex, but the tools to use it are not cheap. I can’t afford $250+ for the next version of Flash Builder and from what I’m seeing even Adobe is jumping on the HTML5 bandwagon. If Adobe offered a free, noncommercial version of Flash Builder, I might be convinced to stay with the platform. but I’m not seeing a future for Flex/Flash and the open-source community is not embracing it.

I’ve looked at HTML5, and it has potential, but it suffers from the same problem all the previous versions of HTML/JavaScript suffered from: uneven browser support. I don’t want to have to rewrite my interface code for every browser version that comes along. That got old years ago. I looked at other options as well, but Java is still the best choice I can find: It is object oriented, strongly typed, open source, platform independent, and has a massive list of free and open source tools to work with it.

The conversion will take time, But I’m planning on releasing the java version as 4.0 in the Fall. If anyone wants to jump on the bandwagon, contact me and I’ll send you my notes on the overhaul. As always, the code is checked in at SourceForge[http://sourceforge.net/projects/astrolabegenera/].

While I was digging through the process of planning the new version, I set up and ran the original java project:

I’ve made a bit of progress since then.