January 16, 2004
Player or virtual machine?
I've just read a post by Darron Schall where he talks about the "virtual machine", instead of the "flash player".
The first difference between the flash player and the java virtual machine is size. Of course, that difference comes from the different funcionality provided. When programing in flash, we cannot acces the file system, the sytem configuration,....
But does it really make sense to try to do in flash the things that can be done in Java?. I'm not sure.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems that macromedia is trying to provide a new development platform. So we'll have Java (Sun), .Net (Microsoft) and Flash (Macromedia).
That sounds good, but I'm afraid we are really close to forget what flash has meant for all these years. I am very excited about our future as flash developers, but I don't want to forget about our past.
Any thoughts?
Posted by Cesar Tardaguila Date: January 16, 2004 11:17 AM | TrackBackHow about a platform? :P
Posted by: Richard Leggett en: January 16, 2004 12:09 PMyou might want to check steven webster's post on this topic.
Posted by: eokyere en: January 16, 2004 01:01 PMif you do not allow html, i think you shd display so. link is:
http://www.richinternetapps.com/archives/000020.html
I actually started actively calling it a virtual machine from the lnik above. I've always thought of it as a virtual machine, but kept calling it the Flash Player as that's what Macromedia officially calls it.. but maybe it's time for a change in terminology. It might even give Flash a better image to those who think it's just an animation technology.
Posted by: darron en: January 16, 2004 01:14 PMIt would be nice to have 2 flash virtual machines, a standard one like we got (with low size) and a professional one which would be faster to make real applications with more features, natives api, ram capabilities, multithreading ... hehe ... Maybe one day, just a thought. :)
Posted by: petepx en: January 16, 2004 01:20 PMOoops!
I didn't know about the Steve Webster's post. It's hard to add anything to what he said!.
Anyway, thanks for pointing me to it.
Posted by: Cesar Tardaguila en: January 16, 2004 02:54 PMFrom my point of view Flash and Java platforms share the same design: the raw code is transformed to intermeidary byte code by a dedicated interpreter; then a separate app owned by the final user exectutes the byte code in its enviroment. This is the Tanenbaum definition of virtual machine, and it fits Flash.
Following the Macromedia vocabulary, that app is a "player", the byte code is a "movie", subsections of byte code is a "scene" and so on; Flash has been designed to add colorfull buttons and animations to websites and Macromedia is talking to trendy and well haired designers, not to bald coders ;)
