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

[Patrick Mueller]

On Feb 21, 2008, at 1:06 PM, Andy Burnett wrote:

> I believe it is a long standing practice on the internet that  
> Newbies are allowed to ask at 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/