Since the first announcement of Falcon's cross compilation feature
Falcon JS, I've been following the blog posts and discussions around cross-compilation of ActionScript to JavaScript. How much interest is there in the Flex community to have JavaScript generation as a future feature in Flex? Since Adobe has been working on Falcon JS, it would make sense to improve whatever code the company contributes to Apache, and continue from there to build a solid JavaScript cross-compiler. Bernd Paradies has posted some information in his blog about the cross-compilation effort http://blogs.adobe.com/bparadie/, in case you haven't seen that. Does anyone know more about the status of Falcon JS, and how far Adobe is planning to implement the cross-compilation feature? Based on the videos from Flex Summit it's just an experimental feature, and there are no plans to release Falcon JS as a finished product. So maybe that's a good opportunity for the community to help Adobe improve the product. I'd be interested in supporting such an effort, although I won't have more than 5-6 hours per week available for it. - Raju |
On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Raju Bitter <[hidden email]>wrote:
> Does anyone know more about the status of Falcon JS, and how far Adobe > is planning to implement the cross-compilation feature? Based on the > videos from Flex Summit it's just an experimental feature, and there > are no plans to release Falcon JS as a finished product. So maybe > that's a good opportunity for the community to help Adobe improve the > product. > Long story short. I wouldn't hold my breath for what Adobe releases as Falcon JS. Not to say that the devs that have worked on it are doing a bad job, but it is incomplete and won't be intended as a final product. Based on discussions with many parties there is some real work needed to be done on this to make it work. 1st, some pretty significant updates to Flex to support the JS cross-compile. 2nd, the cross-compiler itself. This is 100% my guess, but I would suspect that a rouge group would need to work on a new Flex standard... let's call it Flex 5... that is remade with this plan in mind. Then as the cross-compiler comes the Flex code will be created in a way that it will be friendlier to cross-compiling with JS (and possibly other end-points). -- Jonathan Campos |
In reply to this post by Raju Bitter
From: "Raju Bitter" <[hidden email]>
>How much interest is > there in the Flex community to have JavaScript generation as a future > feature in Flex? I think there is a lot of interest, but also a lot of doubts about its future success. >From what I heard, the problem is not really about the language but about the rendering performances. One of the most talkative community person on this subject is Mike Labriola, committers of Apache Flex and technical lead of Spoon, who talked during various User Group / Flex shows both about his believes but also about the experiments him and his team has already done on the subject. He is really convincing, and you can for example hear it on this episode of the Flex Show (start at 53:50): http://www.theflexshow.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/12/23/Flex-Summit-Roundtable-The-Flex-Show-Episode-158 A more succint text version on the Spoon blog: http://www.spoon.as/2011/flex-forward/ Dimitri k. |
In reply to this post by Jonathan Campos
Thanks for your response, Jonathan!
2012/1/10 Jonathan Campos <[hidden email]>: > Long story short. I wouldn't hold my breath for what Adobe releases as > Falcon JS. Not to say that the devs that have worked on it are doing a bad > job, but it is incomplete and won't be intended as a final product. That's what I thought, it's going to be a lot of work to do full cross-compilation for the Flex components with CSS support. > Based on discussions with many parties there is some real work needed to be > done on this to make it work. 1st, some pretty significant updates to Flex > to support the JS cross-compile. 2nd, the cross-compiler itself. Agreed. > This is 100% my guess, but I would suspect that a rouge group would need to > work on a new Flex standard... let's call it Flex 5... that is remade with > this plan in mind. Then as the cross-compiler comes the Flex code will be > created in a way that it will be friendlier to cross-compiling with JS (and > possibly other end-points). Sounds realistic. I've been a contributor to OpenLaszlo, and have a good understanding of how the cross-compilation works. I believe pure ActionScript 3 to JavaScript compilation is not the problem. The current Flex components are much more heavy-weight (and powerful) than what OpenLaszlo has. If cross-compilation of Flex apps is the goal, the components would have to be modified, which is a larger effort - which would result in a new Flex standard. If you have a large 3.x or 4.x Flex app, I don't think it's realistic to have cross-compilation working for the existing apps. But for future apps based on a "Flex 5", it's a different story. Projects like Jangaroo already have ActionScript 3 to JavaScript compilation working (http://www.jangaroo.net/home/), but they use ActionScript as the better JavaScript to create JavaScript apps (please correct me if I'm wrong, I've never used Jangaroo). - Raju - Raju |
In reply to this post by El Koro
Thanks for the info/links, Dimitri.
2012/1/10 Dimitri k. <[hidden email]>: > From what I heard, the problem is not really about the language but about > the rendering performances I still believe that it's possible. Laszlo Systems has created a very large Flash based RIA called Laszlo Webtop. They can cross-compile the app to JavaScript, an the performance is about 70-80% of the speed you have in Flash (Webtop is about 2 mb as an SWF, and around 2.2 mb as a JavaScript file, if I rememer correctly). That was about 2 1/2 years ago, and I haven't been following the recent improvements. > One of the most talkative community person on this subject is Mike Labriola, > committers of Apache Flex and technical lead of Spoon, who talked during > various User Group / Flex shows both about his believes but also about the > experiments him and his team has already done on the subject. I wasn't aware of the work the Spoon group had done in that area. - Raju |
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