BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage News OpenLaszlo Working to Support Flash Player 9 Runtime

OpenLaszlo Working to Support Flash Player 9 Runtime

This item in japanese

OpenLaszlo is working to support the Flash Player 9 Runtime. OpenLaszlo was one of the first application development frameworks to target the Flash Player Runtime (starting with version 7). Since that time, the Adobe Flex framework has surged ahead in adoption, partly because of their support for the Flash Player 9.

In June, 2006 Adobe released the Flash Player 9 runtime. Flash Player 9 is a major enhancement over the previous version, including a brand new virtual machine for ActionScript 3 - featuring a Just In Time (JIT) compiler for translating ActionScript bytecode into native machine code.

The OpenLaszlo team described their efforts in a blog last week:
There are a lot of new and improved APIs provided by the Flash 9 runtime; better media loading, data loading, and network APIs, as well as much more rational imaging and event model. We can probably take a lot of advantage of these by updating and optimizing the swf9 kernel and the runtime to use this where possible.
Henry Minsky, the author of the blog, explains in a comment on the post the level of effort to target the Flash Player 9 runtime:
Yes, it’s funny but the jump from AS2 to AS3 is actually more of a leap than it was to go from AS2 to DHTML! But the benefits are large, we’re hoping to see some great performance improvements in the Flash 9 runtime.
The Flash Player 9 runtime actually includes two virtual machines, one for running code that targets version 9, and a second for SWF movies that target older versions. So, that may in part explain the large gap between AS2 and AS3, as it is an overhaul of the ActionScript language.

For more details on the OpenLaszlo – Flash Player 9 effort read more on their project blog. Also, for more details on the Flash Player read on at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer9/.

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

BT