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While I'll definitely need to check this out further and keep a close eye on it (especially given V8, SquirrelFish and SpiderMonkey), I'm not sold on this being

While I'll definitely need to check this out further and keep a close eye on it (especially given V8, SquirrelFish and SpiderMonkey), I'm not sold on this being a "Flash Killer". Not yet, anyway. Take games, for example. The Tower Defense game is nice enough, but no where near the quality of the Flash based versions. And this is a very, very simple game compared to, say, Fancy Pants Adventures or the like. Can processing.js. I mean, the missiles don't even point at their target, for crying out loud. This is on the level of C64/PET character based graphics, more or less. Again, I know nothing about processing.js at this point, so, perhaps it's possible to do much more. Two other questions come to mind, though: 1. Flash already has its issues vis a vie cross-browser and cross-platform performance. It's not at all bad, and, because of the developer base, pretty well defined, but certainly not perfect. How does this technology compare, especially given the widely disparate support for native canvas and decent JavaScript engines? 2. What about packaging and distribution? .swfs can be self contained, making distribution to, say, portals nice and easy. A whole infrastructure for add supported apps has grown up in the Flash world, as well.

lethain 17y ago
The limitations with the tower defense game are the result of programmer laziness rather than some limitation with JavaScript itself. If the game was reworked to use sprites instead of drawing using basic geometric shapes, it would appear much more polished. The major limitations with JavaScript versus Flash revolve around dealing with media (we had to use a Flash tool to implement conceptual sound support for PTD, http://github.com/rictic/processing-tower-defense/tree/master http://github.com/rictic/processing-tower-defense/tree/maste...), but I think these are generally being resolved with HTML 5. To respond to your questions: 1. With some minor effort we were able to get PTD running on Firefox, Safari and IE. (Chrome didn't exist at that point.) The performance on IE 6 and (I think) 7 were prohibitively bad though, so it wasn't actually playable. Thanks to projects like excanvas, even browsers without native canvas support don't pose a big problem. 2. I don't have Flash experience, but PTD is just a collection of static files. I never felt deployment was a problem.

lethain 17y ago

The limitations with the tower defense game are the result of programmer laziness rather than some limitation with JavaScript itself. If the game was reworked to use sprites instead of drawing using basic geometric shapes, it would appear much more polished. The major limitations with JavaScript versus Flash revolve around dealing with media (we had to use a Flash tool to implement conceptual sound support for PTD, http://github.com/rictic/processing-tower-defense/tree/master http://github.com/rictic/processing-tower-defense/tree/maste...), but I think these are generally being resolved with HTML 5. To respond to your questions: 1. With some minor effort we were able to get PTD running on Firefox, Safari and IE. (Chrome didn't exist at that point.) The performance on IE 6 and (I think) 7 were prohibitively bad though, so it wasn't actually playable. Thanks to projects like excanvas, even browsers without native canvas support don't pose a big problem. 2. I don't have Flash experience, but PTD is just a collection of static files. I never felt deployment was a problem.