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Comment by hendler | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone tried this out? Is it more than a toy?

README says little http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/blob/master/README

http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/demos The demos are basically graphics tests: vector drawing, frame-by-frame animation, tweens.

http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/swf-tag-support-ta... The tag support table shows just how much is missing: everything from SWF 2 onwards! Many of those tags aren't feasible in pure JS right now, anyway.

Also, I think most of the newer SWF files have lots of actionscript bytecode which is something that Gordon probably can't handle unless they implement their own stack-based virtual machine and implement all of the mx.core set of libraries.

A custom virtual machine probably isn't necessary. There are plenty of flash decompilers which can emit AS3 source from bytecode — and since ActionScript 3.0 is basically the old ECMAScript 6 draft spec, it can be trivially downcompiled to plain old Javascript using Mascara (http://ecmascript4.com/). Ideally the conversion would take place on a server-side proxy, and its ouput would subsequently be cached, but it could theoretically be done on the client as well. Re-implementing the standard library remains a major issue, but certainly not insurmountable.

It would be possible (a bit slow though). This has already been done a few times with JS. For example, qBasic (http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=92) or even virtualizing a whole device like the gameboy (http://www.codebase.es/jsgb/).

Interesting. Those work nicely using Safari on my iPhone. Looks promising.

But on Chrome 4.0.288.1 dev moving the mouse over any of the animations crashes the tab.

The demos don't work at all in IE8.

also nothing with opera 10

I have the same experience with Chrome. Mousing over the animation crashes not only the active tab, but all of the tabs in the window.

All the demos work fine for me on the Chrome 4.0.288.1 dev.

Interesting. Works fine on 4.0.249.49.

works for me in Chromium 4.0.266.0

It doesn't look like it supports sound or video.

There appears to be support for video in there, audio is a different issue. http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/blob/master/src/Movie.j...

That's the Flash Movie object, not H264 or Indeo video. A Flash Movie object is what Macromedia decided to call their hybrid format (like "page" for the Web, or "track" for audio).

Well, it could be done with HTML5 and the video tag.

It's a great new beginning, and a monumental effort on the part of one guy (the developer). Flash is undocumented (apart from what Adobe decided to share with search engine crawlers), and difficult to reverse-engineer.

This is not true at all. Flash is now an "open standard", in that Adobe released the specs to the file format, the VM, and most (all?) of the video format. For what it's worth, outside of a few errors in the documentation, it's fairly well written; I was working on a Flash->iPhone App compiler before Adobe announced theirs, and it was fairly straightforward to implement most things.

I saw a tiger head for about a second. I said, "oh cool". Then Chrome said: "Aw, snap!"

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