Smokescreen: a Flash player written in JavaScript and HTML5.

And it’s called Smokescreen.

The code is essentially a Flash player, but written in JavaScript.  Its purpose is to take Flash content and then re-encode it to a cross-platform JavaScript in real time.  Apparently, it works quite well for content such as Flash ads and animation.

Need proof?  Here’s a demo of Smokescreen rendering a Strongbad Email.  It’s not perfect, but it’s new and for now it’s highly effective.  Check out the video for a bit more explanation, and another demo.

Part of the issue with the performance comes from a hefty chunk of code that is required to run the service.  Right now, according to an article at Gizmodo, there are over 8,000 lines of code required to run it.  But in the future, Smokescreen will be going open source, and hopefully a slim-down will come with that.

Our guess is that it won’t be long before we see other alternatives, as well.  As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and at this point, rendering Flash is still very necessary.