Adobe showed off an exciting research project known as Alchemy during the second day of its Max festival in San Francisco.

Alchemy allows developers to utilise existing open source C and C++ code with minimal degradation on a standard Flash platform. The code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5

Branden Hall, CTO of Automata Studios, demonstrated various uses for Alchemy, including playing a full-screen version of Quake and streaming media formats such as Ogg Vorbis. 

Alchemy is particularly well suited for audio or video transcoding, data manipulation, XML parsing, cryptographic functions and physics simulation. According to Adobe, performance under Alchemy is significantly faster than ActionScript 3.0 and approximately 2-10x slower than native C/C++ code. However, the application is not intended for general development of SWF applications using C/C++.

The Alchemy toolkit, which is currently available for download, offers support for OSX, Windows and Linux.

Adobe also introduced a number of other tools at the conference, including a new version of Flex Builder (Gumbo) and Flash Catalyst. The latter product is an impressive design application that facilitiates the easy creation of interactive content without the need for tedious coding. X