A couple of weeks ago I started to work for a new team within Adobe. The team: Performance Engineering for the ActionScript VM (AVM). What am I doing there? Build the infrastructure to track the performance data, analyze performance issues and develop performance workloads for the AVM.
For all reader not familiar with the AVM, it's the virtual machine that is used by the Flash Player to run Flash content. Wait, did I say Flash Player? Yes, the piece of well known software that so many people use and so many believe it's dead (or about to die). I can tell you, that at least from Adobes perspective, that the opposite is the truth (even if the perception out there might be different). Adobe is investing in ActionScript and Flash Player to make it the best language and execution environment for modern web enabled applications. There will be changes to the ActionScript language, which will improve the overall execution performance. The roadmap is available here.
One of the improvements already in place are Workers. Workers help the developer to execute code in a separate thread to create a smooth user experience. Think of some heavy computation that doesn't have to happen in the UI thread anymore. Have a look at the Worker example.
To better keep track of the upcoming performance improvements, this new team was build and I'm happy to be part of it. I'm going to work on a lot of different things over the next few months: automation, webapp/database development, analyzing performance issues, developing the relevant workloads to measure the performance, etc. This sounds exciting.
Riding a dead horse looks different.
For all reader not familiar with the AVM, it's the virtual machine that is used by the Flash Player to run Flash content. Wait, did I say Flash Player? Yes, the piece of well known software that so many people use and so many believe it's dead (or about to die). I can tell you, that at least from Adobes perspective, that the opposite is the truth (even if the perception out there might be different). Adobe is investing in ActionScript and Flash Player to make it the best language and execution environment for modern web enabled applications. There will be changes to the ActionScript language, which will improve the overall execution performance. The roadmap is available here.
One of the improvements already in place are Workers. Workers help the developer to execute code in a separate thread to create a smooth user experience. Think of some heavy computation that doesn't have to happen in the UI thread anymore. Have a look at the Worker example.
To better keep track of the upcoming performance improvements, this new team was build and I'm happy to be part of it. I'm going to work on a lot of different things over the next few months: automation, webapp/database development, analyzing performance issues, developing the relevant workloads to measure the performance, etc. This sounds exciting.
Riding a dead horse looks different.
