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• Erlang - Do I really want to recode all my apps using tail recursive functions?
   
• lua - Love the language but there's breakage between versions and poorly maintained libs.
   
• Haxe - New, I don't do flash. I'm only interested in server side code.
   
• Pike - Much cleaner and faster than PHP.
  

Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).

Yeah, Tinic ranted about that on his blog a while ago, saying he used wine for Flash on Linux (before v9, obviously) -- and he's a FlashPlayer engineer. His entry about this beta release addresses performance. He says he's not happy with the current state of font rendering speed yet, but that it beats the Windows version by 20% with other stuff. They're still working on it.

Over all, you should see better performance of existing content, thanks to the new rendering engine introduced in v8. This is especially true for SWFs (competently) written for v8 and using cacheAsBitmap -- not rerendering vectors every frame seems to improve performance. Who would have thought...

The second performance increase will probably take a while to become common: FP9 comes with a new, JIT compiled VM. The old one is still included for backwards compatibility, but once FP9 has a good install base and is supported by developers making scripting-heavy stuff, you should definitely notice the performance increase -- it's much, much faster.

If somebody feels like playing with it, there's the free (beer) Flex SDK on the Adobe site somewhere. However, I'd like to recommend haXe, a Free (capital F) compiler for a very fine language, with a great type system, that I really enjoy coding in. It supports Flash 6 to 9, the Free NekoVM, and can generate JavaScript (Yes! Typed!). Windows users can use the FlashDevelop plugin, for the rest of us there's Eclipse with EHX.

Previous revisions of Flash Player for Linux preformed very poorly compared to the win32 versions (even the win32 verison in crossover office did a better job).

Yeah, Tinic ranted about that on his blog a while ago, saying he used wine for Flash on Linux (before v9, obviously) -- and he's a FlashPlayer engineer. His entry about this beta release addresses performance. He says he's not happy with the current state of font rendering speed yet, but that it beats the Windows version by 20% with other stuff. They're still working on it.

Over all, you should see better performance of existing content, thanks to the new rendering engine introduced in v8. This is especially true for SWFs (competently) written for v8 and using cacheAsBitmap -- not rerendering vectors every frame seems to improve performance. Who would have thought...

The second performance increase will probably take a while to become common: FP9 comes with a new, JIT compiled VM. The old one is still included for backwards compatibility, but once FP9 has a good install base and is supported by developers making scripting-heavy stuff, you should definitely notice the performance increase -- it's much, much faster.

If somebody feels like playing with it, there's the free (beer) Flex SDK on the Adobe site somewhere. However, I'd like to recommend haXe, a Free (capital F) compiler for a very fine language, with a great type system, that I really enjoy coding in. It supports Flash 6 to 9, the Free NekoVM, and can generate JavaScript (Yes! Typed!). Windows users can use the FlashDevelop plugin, for the rest of us there's Eclipse with EHX.

If I wanted to do this kind of unified development, I'd look at haXe. It may be a nice way to do lite desktop apps and looks cool for server side stuff although delivering apps (flash, javascript) over the web is a no-no in my book.

That's just to name a few, there are others. There is plenty of code out there to generate and modify content, the official specification isn't needed for a player.

To use AJAX... you don't write Javascript ! Use instead GWT or haXe.

Far from being enough. Having structural signatures, first-class functions and method closures are big plus. Watch the haXe Language Reference for more infos. Also, I was not talking about "Dynamic" as reusable but as dynamicly typed.

There's been several JS code generators recently. Apart from GWT there's also haXe which is more ambitious. haXe can also be used on the Server Side and includes some facilities for Dynamic programming (whereas Java is strongly typed 100% of the time).

http://haxe.org/intro

Rich.

I started learning haXe last week. It's pretty cool.
haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!

I started learning haXe last week. It's pretty cool.
haXe compiles to Flash, and JavaScript on the client-side and nekoVM on the server-side.
This is nice because I only need to know one language to build the whole solution.
haXe is a javascript-like language with some OCaml influences. It's implement in OCaml and is quite nifty.
Feel free to check out the Teach myself Flash tutorials I've been writing over the last few days.
To get back to the topic, I started with OpenLaszlo, but I don't really need such a simplistic solution, so I switched to haXe, where I can do everything Flash can do.
On the other hand, I'd rather use Scalable Vector Graphics and not have to use Flash at all! Firefox, please finish implementing SVG!

There's also a bunch of resources for Open Source Flash, in particular the MTASC open source flash compiler and a new promising language called haxe that can be used for Flash but also AJAX/Javascript and on the Server side. Looks like it will be presented at OSCON 2006, might be interesting to follow.

Like haXe ?

Or maybe a flexible language such as haXe ? (shameless plug http://haxe.org)

There is an open source framework for doing JavaScript and Flash called haXe (http://haxe.org. It's still alpha but it looks promising.