AJAXWorld Adobe Systems’ technology chief has made a play for open-source hearts and minds with Flash Player and AIR.

Chief technology officer Kevin Lynch cited moves this year to make Flash Player more palatable to open source while pointing to the imminent release of AIR 1.5 and HTML 5 tags to run Flash video consistently in different browsers as evidence Adobe is playing its in improving support for rich-internet applications (RIAs) in tools, frameworks, and browsers.

He said there was a lot more to be done in the industry to further RIAs, in terms of make them cheaper to build and delivering “better user experiences.”

Lynch told AJAX developers Flash is “open” because it uses Tamarin, the ActionScript Virtual Machine that the company contributed to Mozilla in November 2006 and that came with Flash Player 9.

He also pointed to the lifting of licensing restrictions in May this year for Flash Player Shockwave Flash (SWF) and FLV/F4V that potential lets people build their own versions of Player.

Of course, Adobe’s own Flash Player has not been open sourced, which has limited Google’s use of the player outside of YouTube and has caused tensions.

“For a while there was a licensing agreement around the specification that said you could do what you wanted except build your own player,” Lynch said. “There are [now] no conditions around using SWF.” He said Adobe would try to differentiate by building a better Flash Player.

Adobe is continuing its focus on open source with AIR 1.5, expected in the next few weeks. Version 1.5, codenamed Cosmo, is expected to include updated support for WebKit, featuring the fast SquirrelFIsh JavaScript Engine compiler. “We will be the first to do a production-quality version of SquirrelFish,” Lynch said.

Adobe is also “just about ready” to release video tags from HTML 5, which’ll bring more consistently to the way video runs in different browsers. HTML 5 is not finished and Lynch said Adobe is working to advance the ability for browsers to support rich-web applications, pointing to its work on HTML 5 video tags as the “spirit of how we’ll be helping HTML 5″.

HTML 5 is still a work in progress and, for all Adobe’s good intentions, some might see this as a classic case of a vendor implementing the portions of a forthcoming specification that suits their technology.

The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) stewarding HTML has, in the past, noted Adobe – with others vendors – have implemented proprietary user-interface languages and pushed rich internet application technologies that are platform-specific and proprietary. The group has also acknowledged that its standards process cannot keep pace with vendors pushing their technologies into the market.
by   Gavin Clarke in San Jose

It works by using the Low Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) compiler infrastructure. LLVM is a modular, flexible compiler system that is used widely in a variety of projects. The key reason to choose LLVM is its flexibility and applicability to iPhone development.
A new compiler front end that allowed LLVM to understand ActionScript 3 and used its existing ARM back end to output native ARM assembly code, names as Ahead of Time (AOT) compilation—in contrast to the way Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR function on the desktop using Just in Time (JIT) compilation. Ablility to compile ActionScript to ARM ahead of time, the application gets all the performance benefits that the JIT would offer and the license compliance of not requiring a runtime in the final application.
This allow developers to create applications using their Flash skills and their knowledge of ActionScript 3. In the process,  APIs are also exposed that developers are familiar with so they can not only use the ActionScript language but follow the customary app-building model. When you build your application for the iPhone, there is no interpreted code and no runtime in your final binary. Your application is truly a native iPhone app.