Shumway
I’ve been watching Mozilla’s Shumway project for a while. The project’s lofty goal is to build a renderer for Flash content written entirely in Javascript.
I see Flash as the Commodore 64 or Amiga 500 of it’s generation. It had a ton of downsides (the plug-in isn’t very good, and isn’t universally available everywhere), but it opened up a whole new world of possibilities. More importantly, it’s where we cut our programming teeth: Its brilliant development tools meant people could relatively easily create everything from simple vector graphics to full-blown educational applications and 3D games for the web. Most of that stuff will never be upgraded or redeveloped to run on the browser-native technologies HTML5 brings us. It’d be a shame to lose it all as the world moves on from Flash, wouldn’t it?
Luckily, emulators like WinUAE mean I can play all my old Amiga 500 games on modern hardware if I want to. I see Shumway as the same thing, but for web content of the early 2000s. As much as I dislike Flash as a technology, it warms my cockles to know all that good stuff won’t be lost to the big technology dustbin in the sky.
