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> I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. I'm curious if you've

> I have spent some time looking into this problem and have not found any third party tools that will allow embedded flash to work again. I'm curious if you've tried ruffle: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle It will not work for exactly your problem (powerpoint plugin vs html5 webpage), but I've found most relatively simple flash programs run under it. If the embedded flash content you've got is relatively simple, you might be able to run it in a browser with ruffle. At which point you could swap out the powerpoint presentation from embedding flash alone, to embedding flash + having a link to a webpage for modern powerpoint users, which wouldn't make for good presentations, but would be better than nothing for students reviewing it.

kmeisthax 5y ago
AS3 movies won't work yet. We have a runtime implementation, but adapting our existing display tree for it has been... not a fun time. I have an active PR that fixes a lot of long-standing order-of-operations bugs in Ruffle but it's stalled on... uh... review, mostly. Also, it has a few minor bugs still, especially involving gotos in event handlers, because gotos are evil. I've considered actually porting Ruffle to COM/OLE, which is how you're able to embed Flash in Powerpoint[0]. However, the current state of Rust COM bridging is... not great. I'm actually working on the opposite of that right now: embedding Flash Player itself in a host binary so I can stream automated input into it. I need this to track down those remaining event handler bugs I mentioned. [0] Fun fact: Pretty much all ActiveX components are embeddable in Office, because ActiveX is just "WebOLE". Turns out Microsoft had solved the problem of "sticking apps in other apps and having scripting code access them" years prior to the Web being a thing.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  Lots of great info here. It's heartening to hear that AS3 is being worked on, I'm sure you'll get the issues sorted. I wonder when something like OLE will happen again, but with webassembly based apps ?
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    I mean, Web Components already gives you a pretty similar experience: you can stick arbitrary properties on your custom elements and use shadow DOM to build internal documents that outside code can't inadvertently access. That and WASM is basically feature-equivalent to what ActiveX was trying to do, but actually engineered to be a standard rather than just proxying everything to COM/OLE.

kmeisthax 5y ago

AS3 movies won't work yet. We have a runtime implementation, but adapting our existing display tree for it has been... not a fun time. I have an active PR that fixes a lot of long-standing order-of-operations bugs in Ruffle but it's stalled on... uh... review, mostly. Also, it has a few minor bugs still, especially involving gotos in event handlers, because gotos are evil. I've considered actually porting Ruffle to COM/OLE, which is how you're able to embed Flash in Powerpoint[0]. However, the current state of Rust COM bridging is... not great. I'm actually working on the opposite of that right now: embedding Flash Player itself in a host binary so I can stream automated input into it. I need this to track down those remaining event handler bugs I mentioned. [0] Fun fact: Pretty much all ActiveX components are embeddable in Office, because ActiveX is just "WebOLE". Turns out Microsoft had solved the problem of "sticking apps in other apps and having scripting code access them" years prior to the Web being a thing.

stuaxo 5y ago
Lots of great info here. It's heartening to hear that AS3 is being worked on, I'm sure you'll get the issues sorted. I wonder when something like OLE will happen again, but with webassembly based apps ?
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I mean, Web Components already gives you a pretty similar experience: you can stick arbitrary properties on your custom elements and use shadow DOM to build internal documents that outside code can't inadvertently access. That and WASM is basically feature-equivalent to what ActiveX was trying to do, but actually engineered to be a standard rather than just proxying everything to COM/OLE.