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

[Antero Taivalsaari]

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.

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