induscrypt/software

From the page: "What has yet to be fully shaken-out is the viability of Web-based applications for carrying out tasks we've grown accustomed to doing in native client applications, such as e-mail. Gmail has come a long way and a lot of people are using it, but you still hear some grumblings about that intangible usability difference between a browser-based application and a stand-alone application.

Even if JavaScript-powered, web-based e-mail ultimately takes hold, surely there are other stand-alone applications that will just never make sense in Web form. Two such applications that come to mind are video and photo editing. Similar to games, these are such media-intensive applications that they just can't make sense in JavaScript, right? Yet Adobe has already released Premiere Express for online video editing and is putting the finishing touches on Photoshop Express for Web-based photo editing. What's interesting about these applications is that they aren't technically built in JavaScript; they're built in ActionScript, a close cousin of JavaScript used in Adobe's Flex development environment. But the ActionScript in these applications is compiled, so the net effect is more akin to a native application. Adobe may be foreshadowing the future of Web scripting to some degree, at least in terms of building more feature-rich applications. And in doing so, they're forcing us to rethink just what is possible with scripting languages."