DENG 2.0 Roadmap (first draft)

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Macromedia announced the Flash Player 8.5 today, featuring a completely new virtual machine (AVM2), E4X, RegExp, Binary Sockets and W3C DOM Events.

Flash Player 8.5 (along with the Flex 2 Framework and Flex Builder 2) will be released as public alpha on October 17th.

This marks the beginning of the development of DENG 2.0, a completely refactored DENG version targeted for Flash Player 8.5 and above.

Features i plan for DENG 2.0 (incomplete, vague, and subject to change, just to give you a rough overview):

  • Improved performance
  • Flex 2.0 Integration, targeted for AVM2
  • 100% compliant CSS 3 parser
  • Compliant implementations of SVG-T, XForms 1.1
  • Better support for XHTML, SMIL, XFrames etc.
  • Support for subsets of XUL
  • Support for W3C DOM
  • Better CSS box model implementation (DENG currently doesn’t support absolute/relative positioning and inline-boxes, the tables implementation is not perfect, etc.)
  • Better CSS line box model implementation (DENG uses the native TextField object of the Flash Player to render inline text. This won’t change, but improvements in the Flash Player since version 6 allow some more sophisticated features (e.g. a:hover, left/right floats).
  • GIF, PNG and SVG images (DENG currently supports JPEG only), background images

CSS 3 modules and envisioned compliance:

  • Syntax/Grammar (full)
  • Selectors (full)
  • Values and Units (full)
  • Value Assignment, Cascade, Inheritance (full)
  • Box Model, Vertical (as full as possible)
  • Positioning (as full as possible)
  • Color, Gamma, Color Profiles (partial)
  • Colors and Backgrounds (full)
  • Line Box Model (partial)
  • Text (partial)
  • Fonts (partial)
  • Ruby (none)
  • Generated Content, Markers (as full as possible)
  • Replaced Content (as full as possible)
  • Paged media (as full as possible)
  • User interface (as full as possible)
  • WebFonts (partial)
  • ACSS (none)
  • SMIL (as full as possible)
  • Tables (partial)
  • Columns (partial)
  • SVG (as full as possible)
  • Math (partial)
  • BECSS (none)
  • Media queries (as full as possible)

Stay tuned.

17 thoughts on “DENG 2.0 Roadmap (first draft)”

  2. Wow great to see that’s changes, maybe possible to parser mxml files? included as you mentioned on XUL language support? I’d love to see that on deng 2.0.

    Great Works queue Claus, I wait some feedback on this request I made.

    Thanks

  3. The concept of DENG is it being a “Modular XML Browser”. That means, that you are theoretically able to render everything XML styled by CSS. It just has to be implemented :)

    So yes, DENG would be able to render parts of MXML (most likely not everything i guess), i just haven’t listed it in the roadmap because for me personally, at this time, this has no priority. DENG 2.0 will be released under some OS license again, so you’d be very welcome to help implementing that.

  5. Thank you Claus, and if I can help in something on render MXML some tags maybe be helpfull. So, What kind of OS will release the DENG 2.0?

    And I agree with you, kind of request It’s not instresting in comparation to E4X for example.

    Thanks quick answer.

  6. > What kind of OS will release the DENG 2.0?

    We haven’t decided that yet..

  9. Other BLOGs are claiming that the lack of an open-source A3 compiler will be the death of DENG 2.0. Will this project continue without an open-source tool?

    Also, has anyone used DENG to format math equations?

  10. This was actually a statement made by myself, a reaction to Nicolas Cannasses announcement that there will be no MTASC with AS3 support.

    Having thought about it and having discussed the issue with the DENG team, DENG 2.0 is most likely not dead and we will start development (as planned) with Macromedias own tools (not without the hope there will be an open source AS3 compiler popping up somewhen in the future).

    As for MathML, not that i know of. Good that you mention it though, as MathML certainly should be included in the DENG 2.0 roadmap.

  12. Hey Claus,

    You know my luv for DENG so i won’t echo whats been said, :)

    I do however need it in a project i’m working on, where i want to basically read in XHTML on the fly and figured, DENG is the ducks nuts.

    So, i’ve slowly been working on porting it to FLEX 1.5 (project req at this point) so once i get that up and running, i’ll shoot you over some feedback to keep an eye out for? – i know AS3.0 is a totally different world, but i’ve found when migrating code base to FLEX 2.0 it sometimes pays to see how it fits in 1.5 as with 1.5 you can touch the frameworks code base, where as 2.0 you can’t..

    Incidently, i noticed there is a lot of _level0 use, not sure how FLEX will like that but yeah, i’m sure i’m in for a long week in the porting hehe.

  15. Actually, it is quite easy to import test.swf as resource in openlaszlo.

    <canvas width=”600″ height=”600″>
    <view id=”test” x=”100″ y=”100″ width=”400″ height=”400″ resource=”http:test.swf” />
    <view id=”mask” x=”0″ y=”0″ width=”500″ height=”100″ bgcolor=”blue” opacity=”0.5″ />
    </canvas>

    The second view (id=”mask”) is a mask since the scrolled HTML goes outside the view boundary.

    Next step will be to try to integrate test.as into openlaszlo code .. but the above rough experiment works.

  16. Yes it should be quite straightforward to load the DENG SWF into your Laszlo application. Please let me know if you run into trouble.

    As for DENG 2.0, i don’t know if Laszlo plans to port their stuff over to AS3, if they do, it should be even easier to integrate it (we haven’t even started with DENG 2.0 though..)

  17. hey i just stumbled accross DENG while looking for a way to use xforms, it seems to be the best tool around, and it has impressed me so far, I have setup IE 7beta 2day and DENG works, this is because of the flash support no doubt, so from someone who usually struggles to find tools that deliver what they promise, for a change I have been suprised by a marvelous little DENG thanks i hope that things work out for DENG as the roadmap looks promisiong, if i think about how DENG could compliment ajax applications the web seem endless

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