[General] Is there any interest in porting Lively to Flash 9?

I believe it is a long standing practice on the internet that Newbies are
allowed to ask@least one heretical question a day. So...  I am wondering
whether the Flash VM is a possible target for Lively?  I know that the idea
is to try to avoid plug-ins, it is just that Flash 9 seems to be so fast -
and so widely available - that it could be a fantastic platform for the
system.

Cheers
AB
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On Feb 21, 2008,@1:06 PM, Andy Burnett wrote:

> I believe it is a long standing practice on the internet that  
> Newbies are allowed to ask@least one heretical question a day.  
> So...  I am wondering whether the Flash VM is a possible target for  
> Lively?  I know that the idea is to try to avoid plug-ins, it is  
> just that Flash 9 seems to be so fast - and so widely available -  
> that it could be a fantastic platform for the system.


I suspect you are thinking of Flex / ActionScript 3.0.  I think one of  
the problems is that AS 3 is lacking some of the uber-dynamic features  
available in JavaScript, like eval().  I'm guessing that, in LK, when  
you "edit a method", the method body is eval'd (or passed into  
Function(), which I believe is also unavailable), and then attached to  
the relevant object (class?).  You might imagine rigging something up  
where you send 'classes' to reload to a server, which compiles them to  
ABC (AS 3.0 bytecode format), and then hope that there's some way of  
dynamically loading the .abc file in a running Flash movie.  
Alternatively, write a compiler in AS 3.0 that compiles 'source' to an  
ABC format, and then use a dynamic loading capability to 'load' the  
class.

Both seem pretty painful.

Another option might be to use Flash as the UI, but use 'browser JS'  
in the browser as your 'code'.  Since I believe you can bi-
directionally talk between a Flash movie and browser JS.  Still seems  
kinda painful.

But here's the killer for me.  Flex currently doesn't support the  
mouse wheel on the Mac to scroll through scrollable things.  Making it  
totally useless as a UI framework for me.  Anymore, the only use I  
have for scroll bars, almost anywhere, is the visual feedback; the  
inane precise mousing required to drive it is frankly nuts.

Lots of assumptions here; please correct me if I'm wrong!

Patrick Mueller
http://muellerware.org/

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008@8:59 PM, Patrick Mueller <[hidden email]>
wrote:


Hi Patrick
Thanks for your thoughts. You are quite right about the dynamic compilation
problem. My thinking was thrown off track by the work on Vista Smalltalk (
http://vistasmalltalk.wordpress.com/). What I had forgotten was that rather
than using the Flash VM to execute Javascript,  Peter had first written a
lisp interpreter in Actionscript and then used that to interpret and run
Smalltalk.  Sadly, that project now seems to be dead, but it did show great
potential.

Re the scroll wheel problem. I have a funny feeling that that problem is
actually solvable. I think there is a way of coding up scroll wheel support
in Flex.

Cheers
AB
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Andy Burnett wrote:
> I believe it is a long standing practice on the internet that Newbies
> are allowed to ask@least one heretical question a day. So...  I am
> wondering whether the Flash VM is a possible target for Lively?  I know
> that the idea is to try to avoid plug-ins, it is just that Flash 9 seems
> to be so fast - and so widely available - that it could be a fantastic
> platform for the system.

A quick reply:

We've certainly talked about porting the Lively
Kernel to run on Flash.  There are three main
reasons why we haven't done that:

(1) Our general preference in the project has been
to avoid plug-in components as much as possible.
In fact, one of our main research goals was to
build a web application environment that would
run in a regular web browser without any plug-in
components whatsoever.

(2) Our resources are limited and we had to choose
which platforms to support.  It should be relatively
easy to retarget the Lively Kernel to run on Flash,
but we haven't had the time to do that yet.

(3) (In response to your heretical question...) As you
can imagine, using a Flash plug-in wouldn't make our
project very easy to market inside Sun.

Best regards,

-- Antero Taivalsaari, Sun Labs Lively Kernel team