Adobe offers a free version of their Flex SDK for building Rich Internet Applications with their MXML markup language and ActionScript 3.0 application language.
I am suprised at how similar the Adobe Flash architecture is to Microsoft’s Xaml
- Adobe’s samples are very similar to Microsoft’s AJAX samples
- MXML and ActionScript are use “code-behind” in a very similar way to XAML and C#
- ActionScript 3.0 is compiled like C#
ActionScript seems to have gone through a transformation, from a simple JavaScript interpreter to an object-oriented, compiled language similar to Java or C# – I have read that compiled ActionScript 3.0 is very fast, although I haven’t had time to test it myself.
ActionScript does have classes, arrays, dictionaries, and strings which are the main elements that I have used in the Vista Smalltalk runtime kernel. I will look at the possiblity of porting the interpreter core and Lisp reader to ActionScript (the Smalltalk compiler requires the Antlr libraries which probably can’t be ported).
It would certainly be interesting if it turns out to be possible.
I would love to run smalltalk on top of Flash 9 – suddenly all our runtime installation problems just vanish!
Comment by Andy Burnett — January 31, 2007 @ 8:22 pm
[...] started off using .NET and WPF, back in July 2006. After making steady progress for six months, he heard about Flex 2.0 at the end of January 2007. Two days later he had posted his first proof-of-concept tests of lisp [...]
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