If Shumway ever gets completed and officially supported, it could extend swf format lifetime but it would also introduce a platform fragmentation.
>Think about it this way. Right now Flash Player is implemented in a >combination of low-level programming languages and compiled for native code >statically. If it were instead written in JavaScript and the used the >JavaScript JIT to compile it to native code what would be the real difference >to us? Yes, there are concerns as some have pointed out that the browser does >not yet have the native APIs that a lower level language has... give it time. I have played with this code and considered contributing to the project quite a while back. It's definitely a JavaScript library. It's also just big and right now contains some FireFox specific code... See, there is a beautiful evolution to these things. We got rid of plugins and made everything run in the browser. This is great, there is no plugin to install, unfortunately it means we download a lot of code. So, people move this code to libraries so we can share them, but we still have to download it on occasion. Someday someone brilliant will come up with the idea of preinstalling all of this code into the browser so we only need to download it once. When that happens, I propose we call it a plugin. In any case, Shumway may never reach parity, but it was far enough along to run simple ActionScript apps and eventually may be able to run Flex apps, which would be a huge win. I have spent a lot of time inside of these virtual machines. Google's v8 engine is frankly what Flash Player's VM was hoping to grow up to be someday. Running SWFs inside of the browser is feasible. My larger concerns is if the interest will be there to complete a project like shumway or if it will stay forever 85% implemented. Mike
