SWF Spec is now less restrictive !

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200804/050108AdobeOSP.html

Years ago I wrote a SWF vector renderer in Java as part of a multimedia player being developed by Tekadence (went pop in the dot-com bubble). It was hard and I never managed to figure out all the corner cases. So I don't expect to see a quality pure Java Flash Player any time soon.

However, what this does mean is that I can see an opportunity for treating SWF as a standard vector format for general use and for AS3 bytecode as viable general binary code format.

Look for more thoughts and announcements on the future of JavaSWF soon.