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Adobe and Mozilla Foundation Collaborate on ECMAScript

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shiny-happy-pengins dept.

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."

3 of 142 comments (clear)

  1. My......God...... by ObsessiveMathsFreak · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    May the Maths Be with you!
  2. Re:Jumping the Gun by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Take it easy by springMute · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.