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Adobe and Mozilla Foundation Collaborate on ECMAScript
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Nov 07, 2006 09:23 AM
from the shiny-happy-pengins dept.
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."
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Technology: Implications of the Mozilla/Adobe Partnership 104 comments
Fraggle writes "Recently the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced a partnership, working together on the next generation
JavaScript/ActionScript JIT Virtual Machine. The Browser Den looks at what this means for the future of scripting in Mozilla, and how this partnership with Adobe may affect Mozilla's support for other technologies such as SVG." From the article: "On the Mozilla side the plan is to integrate to code with SpiderMonkey which is Mozilla's current JavaScript implementation that is written in C. This is needed because Tamarin is not a drop-in replacement for SpiderMonkey as it provides necessary features that are not available in Tamarin. The combined SpiderMonkey with integrated Tamarin should not have any problems with old JavaScript and should show a performance boost for most. However, skilled scripters are sure to find ways of optimising performance to get even more gains."
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My......God...... (Score:5, Funny)
This can't be a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
I like to compare their products to similar ones developed by the KDE community. Take KPDF, for instance. It manages to be much faster and more stable than Adobe's Acrobat Reader, yet performs the very same functionality. And I'm sure we've all e
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I won't deny that it may result in more memory usage, but the virtual machine would make Mozilla's JavaScript engine faster [1]. And remember that JS is extensively used in Mozilla's GUI, and in fact, they intend to migrate more non-critical C++ code to JS in the future (for faster development, security, etc.).
[1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/20 06/11/project_tamarin.html [mozillazine.org]
uhhh (Score:2, Troll)
The unstated benefit: (Score:2)
If and when this occurs, we could expect to see a 64-bit flash plugin (finally), as the main blocking factor was the ActionScript VM, according to developer blogs.
AJAX and Flash (Score:2)
Jumping the Gun (Score:2, Informative)
While you may know more than you put in the summary, I suspect you are jumping the gun here. The fact that a Flash9_DotReleases_Branch tag shows up in an open source CVS repository is certainly no reason to infer that they will "open source Flash." Perhaps that tag referred to a point at which the project was compatible/comparable with Flash 9?
In fact, after re
Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry dude, I've stopped believing blogs as most of them (including Linux on the Wii) are nothing but lies and hoaxes.
It's one thing not to believe a random blog when it makes weird claims. It's another not to believe a blog from the person doing the work, when it is an expected move and is what the company talked about doing months ago. After the Adobe/Macromedia merger, Adobe stated they were working to integrate PDF (an open standard) and Flash to make for better, interactive Web functionality and that they planned to make the system open to encourage open source adoption.
Parent
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ECMAScript != Flash (Score:2)
ECMAScript with support for VRML and related vector/plane graphics animation technology could compete with something like Flash, but I wouldn't call it a replacement.
I would call it a standards-based answer to Microsoft's clumsy attempt to create a competing "standard" that only runs on WinXX. FUD for FUD, the battle over market share continues to be about media mind share, not quality, performance, scalability, portability, or any other technical "issue". Heck, most of the FUD bombs launched aren't ev
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If you need an ECMAScript parser.... (Score:4, Informative)
It looks like they rolled their own parser for Tamarin - AbcParse.cpp looks hand coded [mozilla.org] to me. Maybe that was more efficient than yacc?
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Now, I think it just stands for... um... ABC.
(Maybe if they had chosen a monkey with a name starting with "A", the acronyms would have been more meaningful...)
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Oh, you mean, _not_ an ECMAScript parser. But you're right, and thanks for the correction.
> the ECMAScript parser, written in ActionScript, is here.
Thanks for the pointer! Wow, looks like they hand-rolled this as well... that's a doozy.
Please add multithreading (Score:3, Insightful)
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Where some function of thisY() is dependent on the execution of thisX(), except you're saying that thisX() runs slower than thisY(), so you write some sort of timeout to run thisY() after thisX has finished (by estimation, as you mentioned.)
Why don't you do this instead:
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JavaScript IN A WEB CONTEXT does not. That's a problem that's hard to solve without breaking lots of existing pages that assume the single-thread run-to-completion semantics and depend on it.
In Gecko, the DOM code is also effectively single-threaded. Changing that could be done, but would likely have significant performance impact...
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http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/proposals/iterat
A Step in a direction (Score:3, Informative)
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Not to mention I don't need to see distorted effects to display text on page.
I'm not particularly amazed by 360 views of people or objects, quicktime could do this long ago.
Nor am I particularly amazed by embedded movies in Flash either.
Someh
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In other words it's a flash interface to a CMS.
Generally I'm browsing the web full-screen (F11). I was really annoyed at how the content wasn't already preloaded on the page, scrolling with the interface seemed very unnatural and slow loading because of this (not to mention my laptop fans were at maximum).
It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey (Score:2, Interesting)
This is great news - assuming it replaces
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Re:It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey (Score:5, Informative)
From Frank Hecker, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, at http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-ta marin [hecker.org]:
Parent
Linux distros required to include LOGO .. (Score:2)
They're free to use any patches as long as they don't call it Firefox. From what I can figure out it is a dispute over the use of the logo. Debian are happy to use the codebase they just don't want to include the logo. It's also not unreasonable for Mozilla to want to verify patches for Mozilla Firefox.
was Re:It can't be any worse than SpiderM
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By "related to" do you mean "there's some JS involved somewhere, possibly calling native code where lots of time is spent"? Or you mean "I've profiled it, and the time is spent in the JS engine"?
If you _haven't_ profiled it, then you're basically making assumptions that might or might not be right (but probably aren't, given most of the profiles of "JS is slow" bugs that I've seen -- in almost all cases the problem
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There's a detailed commentary (Score:5, Informative)
JIT for javascript (Score:3, Interesting)
this will (one day) give a just in time compiler
and virtual machine for javascript in firefox.
This should lead to big speedups in many
web applications
Read these before you spread FUD (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressre
And here is a great blog post from Tinic, one of the Flash Player engineers:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2006/11/spidermonkeys-r
And the Tamarin FAQ:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html [mozilla.org]
Please read these before you post FUD. Oh wait... This is
Adobe needs to open the plugin's source... (Score:2)
Especially — the Acrobat-plugin. You may not know this, but the plugin does little work other than spawning off an instance of acroread (a separate process). This means, they can keep their proprietary secrets intact, and open the source code of the plugin itself.
This would allow various BSDs, for example, which can all run Linux executables, to have the plugin in their natively-compiled browsers. Same goes for 64-bit browsers on Linux (64-bit plugin can spawn off the 32-bit executable). Even on Lin
Take it easy (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Mod parent up! (Score:2)
Brendan Eich's blog [mozillazine.org]
Frank Hecker's blog [hecker.org]
Request, Please. (Score:2, Interesting)
ECMAScript... (Score:2, Interesting)
Actionscript 100 times slower than qbasic (Score:2)
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In my personal tests, Actionscript is over 100 times slower than Quickbasic. Why the hell is that the case? Both are interpreted languages. Actionscript even compiles to bytecode before it's executed, and I think Quickbasic does something similar as well. Does static typing alone really cause a language to run faster? Or is it just what happens when you design interpreters for high vs. low-specification processors?
With which version of the FlashPlayer did you do that test?
Tamarin is the VM introduced fo
Benchmarks (Score:3, Informative)
GREAT news for OpenLaszlo, Firefox and AJAX! (Score:4, Informative)
OpenLaszlo [openlaszlo.org]'s Legals Project [openlaszlo.org] will benefit immensely from this, because the OpenLaszlo compiler will directly target the AVM2 virtual machine that was just released as Open Source! Thanks to AVM2, Firefox will be a much better AJAX application delivery and development platform. OpenLaszlo is in a position to take excellent advantage of that, for the benifit of users as well as developers. Not only will AVM2 make OpenLaszlo applications run faster on Firefox, but opening up the AVM2 virtual machine will make it possible to develop much more powerful debuggers and integrated development environments.
All AJAX applications running on Firefox benefit, but Firefox itself will also benefit from integrating AVM2, because so much of FireFox is written in JavaScript itself.
AVM2 will be a huge improvement, because Firefox's current JavaScript interpreter, SpiderMonkey, is so extremely inefficient and wasteful of memory, that not only does it come in last in the computer language shootout [debian.org], but it's actually TWICE as band and the next worst language, Smalltalk! (That's REALLY BAD.)
An important feature currently missing from Firefox that I'm looking forward to is a way to load pre-compiled binary bytecode into Firefox (like SWF9 files but without the graphics), instead of parsing and re-compiling the JavaScript source text every time. That's one of Flash's major advantages over browser-based JavaScript: it can quickly load and run pre-compiled AJAX applications much faster, thanks to the fact that it doesn't have to parse and compile huge amounts of JavaScript source code text files every time it starts up.
-Don
Open Source Compiler (Score:3, Informative)
Re:And evil hackers everywhere rejoice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Honestly. You're probably one of the guys who claim that "Javascript isn't programming". Eh. Maybe I shouldn't assume things.
Still, the point is that the ECMA spec for inline browser c-like scripting has been updated at least three times since its standardization in 1999. Did you kno