Adobe and Mozilla Foundation Collaborate on ECMAScript

gemal writes "I just saw a project called Tamarin (AVM2 open source) Flash9_DotReleases_Branch initial revision checked into the Mozilla CVS repository. Shortly afterwards came the following press release: ' Adobe and the Mozilla Foundation today announced that Adobe has contributed source code for the ActionScript Virtual Machine, the powerful standards-based scripting language engine in Adobe Flash Player, to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications. This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world.' You can read about the Tamarin project on the Mozilla site."

Comments

My......God......

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

AJAX in Flash, with a Web 2.0 hype engine. May god have mercy on us all.

Re:Jumping the Gun

[Anonymous Coward]

You're incorrect. See this blog entry from an Flash Player engineer: http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-re lative-tamarin-joins.html

It is not an attempt to re-implement the ActionScript Virtual Machine (runtime). It *is* the ActionScript Virtual Machine. Adobe and Mozilla are working together to build a common runtime, that already exists in Flash Player 9 and is already ECMAScript 4 compliant. Adobe just saved Mozilla a lot of time and hassle by giving them a high performance virtual machine that already implements the ECMAScript 4 spec.

Any changes Mozilla makes will find its way into the Flash Player. Any changes Adobe makes will find its way into Firefox.

There's a detailed commentary

[henni16]

..on the issue by Mozilla Foundation's executive director: Frank Hecker's blog

Read these before you spread FUD

[md17]

Here is the official Adobe Announcement:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressrel eases/200611/110706Mozilla.html

And here is a great blog post from Tinic, one of the Flash Player engineers:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-re lative-tamarin-joins.html

And the Tamarin FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Please read these before you post FUD. Oh wait... This is /. FUD away. ;)

Take it easy

[springMute]

Just because I know people will jump the gut and make comments totally unrelated to this news just so they have something to bitch about, here's what Mike (One of the lead Linux engineers at Adobe) had to say:

Today, Adobe released the source for its ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

That's what Adobe did. Since this blog is a common stop for open source-minded folk, I thought it might be pertinent to use this space to discuss what Adobe didn't do:

        * Adobe did not open source the Flash Player.
        * Adobe did not incorporate the Flash Player into Mozilla.
        * Adobe did not license Mozilla's HTML rendering engine.
        * Adobe did not purchase Mozilla, or vice versa.

The project is specified by the name Tamarin, as in the monkey, in keeping with Mozilla's primate-naming conventions. Fun fact: Adobe is contributing around 135 KLOC (thousands of lines of code) of source code to the Tamarin project. So, in the grand tradition of open source collaboration, I invite you to jump right in.

Also see Tinic Uro's blog for more information.

This is not related to porting or open-sourcing Flash at all. It's all about ECMAScript, which is what JavaScript and ActionScript uses. This doesn't mean Mozilla will support ActionScript either, as it's just the virtual machine that's being opened, not the 'internal' functionality.

Re:It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey

[Rescate]

From Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, at http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-ta marin:

The current SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine (used in Firefox, etc.) will not be replaced, as it does more than just provide a virtual machine; rather the Tamarin code will be integrated into SpiderMonkey. On compilers, the current SpiderMonkey engine can convert JavaScript to byte code, but does not have the ability to convert byte code to native machine instructions; this is a major feature that Tamarin provides. I don't know enough to comment on relative code quality; I'll leave this to others who've actually had experience with both code bases.