J2AVM is a Java-to-AVM2 translator that I am working on. The AVM2 is the new ActionScript Virtual Machine in the Flash 9 Player. The goal is to enable development of Flash and AIR applications in Java.
Over the past few weeks I've been going back and forth between several different approaches to J2AVM. Having too many options can be a bad thing.
For a while I've been experimenting with the OpenJDK compiler (javac) in order to take Java source as the input and looking at the "asc" Jar in the Flex SDK (which will be open sourced later this year). The benefit of that approach is that library support could be implemented by source-level transformations on the Java AST. Using the Flex SDK to emit the AVM2 bytecode also means not having to maintain that code within JavaSWF (it already exists in a rough form).
However, for several reasons, I've reverted back to the Java bytecode to AVM2 bytecode translator (using JavaSWF).
I hope to present a prototype of J2AVM at a company meeting in 3 weeks time and bytecode-to-bytecode translation will get me further along in the limited time left. It also holds out the possibility of translating JVM languages other than Java (Scala ?).
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
J2AVM - Crystallizing the Approach
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I've been taking a look at the j2avm code. Unfortunately, the code in trunk does not compile. It seems that there was a major refactoring at around last Oct, which was stopped abruptly at around Feb., very incomplete I might add. It took me a while to get the October version, and with a little creative updating, I've gotten j2avm to work.
Is there a plan to continue the j2avm project? It'd be very interesting to be able to use java to develop flash applications . This is somewhat akin to what GWT is doing, but targeting AVM would be a much better performing way to to develop Rich Clients.
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