Gordon: An open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript

http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

by r11t • 17 years ago

246 97 17 years ago

github.com

hendler• 17 years ago

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

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

chipsy• 17 years ago

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.

lt• 17 years ago

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.

catch232• 17 years ago

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.

rabidsnail• 17 years ago

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

voodootikigod• 17 years ago

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

cmars232• 17 years ago

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

godDLL2• 17 years ago

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.

daeken• 17 years ago

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.

axod• 17 years ago

Quick link to demo:

http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/raw/master/demos/tiger....

Wish people made github pages a bit more friendly. It's like being thrown into a pit of 1s and 0s.

bdotdub• 17 years ago

Here are some other links: http://wiki.github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/demos

ronnier• 17 years ago

Demos posted here: http://paulirish.com/work/gordon/demos/

knv• 17 years ago

All three of them crashed my Chrome 4.0 tab.

timf2• 17 years ago

Cool technology to pursue but considering how Flash content's CPU requirements are often a problem on C-based interpreters, this doesn't seem like a practical thing.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

When you see a pig dance it is impolite to comment on the quality of the dance, but you can express amazement at that it dances at all ;)

Let's give them a bit and see how far they take it. With a bit of luck they get some help from a nifty jit for js and who knows what might happen.

The evil .swf might turn in to a standard component after all, if only via a somewhat roundabout way.

I really wonder how they're going to do audio though, and capture devices and such are probably out (I can see a route to do video via the canvas, it's going to be bloody slow though unless js gets sped up a lot compared to where it is today).

uggedal• 17 years ago

If the new HTML5 <device> element gets implemented they could use that for capture devices: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

s3graham2• 17 years ago

It's translating to SVG, so there's "just" the script translation overhead, not rendering overhead. I think it's quite practical if maybe not especially useful given Flash penetration.

I wrote a Flash player for the PS2 ~9 years ago now that was fast enough. I'd say that current PCs + jitted JS are faster than that platform.

timf2• 17 years ago

> there's "just" the script translation overhead, not rendering overhead

Ah that makes a lot more sense, thanks for pointing that out.

flog• 17 years ago

This was my 2009 new-years prediction... damn it, just out! The best demo is http://jancona.com/gordon/demos/blue.html

peregrine2• 17 years ago

If you double click it it will kill Chrome. AW SNAP.

Slashed2• 17 years ago

Don't know. Works fine for me..

skoob• 17 years ago

Then don't double click it.

metachor2• 17 years ago

Just mousing over it causes all my Chrome tabs to crash, consistently. Using release(not Dev) build.

drtse4• 17 years ago

All the three demos work fine on chrome dev build 4.0.249.64

wensing5• 17 years ago

Framerate on the iPhone is terrible for the part with all the stars, then quite good.

tvon• 17 years ago

Ditto, using a 3GS.

JulesLt3• 17 years ago

Considering that the CPU usage on a Mac is lower than the Flash version of the same demo, that perhaps says a lot about the prospects of Flash on mobile devices . . .

leoc3• 17 years ago

Is there any kind of "Flashstone" benchmark app?

kqr2• 17 years ago

Just in case anyone was wondering about the project name and is not too familiar with classic science fiction:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_gordon

Raphael• 17 years ago

Flash! Ah ah. He's a miracle.

leoc3• 17 years ago

"Dispatch war rocket AJAX to bring back his body!"

abstractbill3• 17 years ago

Of course it's damn impressive, but it doesn't seem very useful to me.

Nobody uses Flash for the language (actionscript is a terrible mash-up of javascript and Java, and haXe is not a lot better), or because we think the virtual machine is awesome in some way. Simply, we use it to bridge the gap between what web browsers can do and what native apps can do (access to webcams and microphones, local files, real tcp/ip sockets, etc, etc).

Having said all that, who knows - maybe web browsers really will eventually bridge those gaps themselves, and this will just be used to run legacy Flash code. It's possible I guess.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

I invite you to switch your flash player off for a bit and see how many sites use it for all kinds of stuff.

It's a nuisance but it is so pervasive it's not even funny.

artpop• 17 years ago

I already have, it is wonderful.

http://github.com/rentzsch/clicktoflash

eru• 17 years ago

I can get by without ads pretty fine.

(Though I still have the flash turned on for the occasional video or game.)

racketman4• 17 years ago

Actionscript 3 isn't that bad.

abstractbill3• 17 years ago

Compared to javascript though? (that's the point after all). I definitely prefer javascript to as3.

wensing5• 17 years ago

How is it not useful for people that need to be successful in an era when browsers aren't bridging those gaps themselves?

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

Because a user is going to get the same experience already with the latest Flash player, in any browser. In JavaScript, there are numerous differences, ranging from the subtle to the not-so-subtle (do they even have canvas?) "Standards" aren't worth anything if they aren't, you know, standard.

Raphael_Amiard• 17 years ago

>this will just be used to run legacy Flash code

Wether flash stays dominant or not, this would still provide a way to run flash code without any proprietary plugin, and in any modern browser, so the interest is still big, from an user point of view

JulesLt3• 17 years ago

While no one uses Flash for the language, there are a lot of (non-developers) out there who use Flash (MX,CS4 or whatever it's called this week) to produce animation, etc - and we're still a long way of having a similar set of tools that produce 'browser native' content.

I'm intrigued as to how much Flash it does cover.

mcav2• 17 years ago

The demo uses 1/3 as much CPU as a similar Flash app would on my Mac. Very cool.

mortenjorck2• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if that says more about the poor optimization of the Mac Flash plugin or the great optimization of your browser's (Safari? Mac Chrome?) JS interpreter.

Probably both.

mcav2• 17 years ago

[Safari 4, though I would expect Chrome to fare well too.]

tedmielczarek• 17 years ago

There's a lot more overhead to the plugin model, since the browser has to call to the plugin via NPAPI and the plugin has to draw itself separately, vs. just being integrated into the normal reflow/repaint of the webpage.

wensing5• 17 years ago

SWF files on the iPhone.

abstractbill3• 17 years ago

But not useful SWF files on the iPhone. This doesn't magically give you anything you didn't already have in javascript.

mortenjorck2• 17 years ago

Yes, but that big Flash site you just finished with no budget for an iPhone version just got a lot cheaper to re-target.

wensing5• 17 years ago

Unless you aren't starting from scratch, as you said ("legacy Flash code") in your other comment.

s3graham2• 17 years ago

It gives you the Flash (animation) authoring environment without plugin requirement for playback.

varjag• 17 years ago

Flash Gordon: Worst Search Engine Terms Since A* Algorithm

a-priori• 17 years ago

I think that title belongs to "God" (http://god.rubyforge.org/)

Keyframe• 17 years ago

Try D!

pjhyett• 17 years ago

Funny enough, that site still appears on the first page of google search results for "god".

mrcharles• 17 years ago

I always thought a good anti-piracy measure would be to name your TV Show / Band / Game "The".

pretz• 17 years ago

Hmmm, the the are surprisingly searchable: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8...

JulesLt3• 17 years ago

Like 'The The'? I always liked 'Various' but now they come up as 3rd result in Google.

chrischen• 17 years ago

Yes but it still hurts people trying to legitimately find it.

phsr• 17 years ago

I always thought it would be funny to have a band named "Those Guys" and the first single would be "That Song"

Asking someone if they heard the single would thoroughly confuse people "Have you heard That Song by Those Guys?

brunoc• 17 years ago

There's a band called '12 year old girls'.

omouse• 17 years ago

So? Find the link, bookmark it and never search for it again :|

andyking• 17 years ago

I was looking the other day for the webcam in the nearby village of, er, Flash. It took me a few seconds to realise why my searches for "Flash webcam" weren't finding it.

funkdobiest• 17 years ago

Too bad the name is already used for a flash decompiler http://www.futurecandy.net/

galactus• 17 years ago

I had already used the name for my lisp flash library :( http://wiki.freaks-unidos.net/gordon (not that it is a very original name or anything ;))

mahmud• 17 years ago

Dude!

Where on bloody earth have you been? Could you please MIT the source code for Gordon so we can work on it?

People refused to touch it because of the license.

ash• 17 years ago

What's wrong about LGPL?

dflock• 17 years ago

This leaks memory like a sieve on Chromium, unfortunately. Be very interested to see where this goes eventually though.

gcb3• 17 years ago

Great! now people will go back to blocking JS to avoid ads like the old days.

All that easy ride of blocking just the flash player left the web all screwed up with that JS for content running loose.

Good ridance, ajax.

duairc• 17 years ago

Does this actually implement the equivalent of Adobe's Flash runtime in Javascript? Does it work for all SWFs? If so, is there some sort of magic involved? If this works, how come things like Gnash and swfdec have never been able to achieve full compatability with Flash, yet this has seemingly come out of nowhere and done just that?

Gordon: An open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript

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