Re: [Gnash-dev] Gnash extensions question

[Rob Savoye]

Udo Giacomozzi wrote:

> BTW, when you search around for Gnash discussions you will find many
> Flash developers actually *concerned* because of Gnash. They fear
> having different players will make development more difficult. With a

  Personally, any flash developer scared of Gnash should just ignore us,
and live in their tightly closed world. I've read some of same blogs,
and if this attitude prevailed, we wouldn't have projects like Firefox,
OpenOffice, etc...

> I'm a big friend of the extension mechanism (have great uses for it,
> for example direct file system access). However, I think we should be
> careful with it. It is a great thing for embedded devices, for sure.
> But it may a "problem" for web browser plugins when Gnash has more

  My gut feeling is the extension mechanism is primarily for embedded
platforms, as it'll let people add more hardware specific classes. At
the same time, current Flash implementations are pretty limited, really.
What if you want to access a real SQL database from a Flash movie ?
Access a GPS so your Flash based GIS software works on your PDA ?

  Some people will want to use extensions on the desktop, but that'll
probably be less common. As long as Gnash is compatible with the Adobe
player, nobody should notice any difference when web browsing. If it
gets to where Gnash becomes popular enough that people are doing
interesting things with Gnash extensions on the desktop, then that's
life, and Adobe can add support for plugins too. After all, all of our
code is visible.

        - rob -