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."

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

[ObsessiveMathsFreak (773371)]

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

This can't be a good thing.

[by Anonymous Coward]

You're correct, this really can't be a good thing. Adobe and Mozilla are both companies that, in my experience, tend to put out extremely bloated and unstable software packages. And they do this for software that should be agile, and have a relatively low footprint.

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

The unstated benefit:

[Ayanami Rei (621112)]

64-bit support is being worked on currently now that the source code is intended to be used in multiple products.
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.

Jumping the Gun

[eldavojohn (898314)]

I just saw a project called Tamarin (AVM2 open source) Flash9_DotReleases_Branch initial revision checked into the Mozilla CVS repository.

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

[by 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 [kaourantin.net]

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.

Re:Jumping the Gun

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746)]

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.

Re:

[coyote4til7 (189857)]

Where did you read "open source flash"? The whole Slashdot summary and the linked project page all refer to ECMAScript, aka ActionScript, aka Javascript. The linked project page makes it pretty clear that Mozilla and Adobe plan to use the Tamarin project as they basis of JavaScript (in Mozilla projects) and the ActionScript _portion_ of the Flash Player. RTFSS (RTF Slashdot Summary) before inserting foot in mouth.

If you need an ECMAScript parser....

[tcopeland (32225)]

...check out the Dojo project's JavaCC ECMAScript grammar [blogs.com].

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?

Please add multithreading

[by Anonymous Coward]

Javascripts single-threaded design is the biggest roadblock on the way to a web-app platform.

Re:

[vaderhelmet (591186)]

My biggest complaint is the fact that it doesn't complete execution on a function before moving to the next. Having to estimate execution time, then using a timer to fire dependant functions is a pain. This would be much better if it were a "jump and link" situation.

Re:

[twofidyKidd (615722)]

I'm confused by this. It sounds like you're writing code like this:

function thisX(args){
SomeCode;
SomeCode;
thisX();
}

function thisY(args){
SomeCode;
thisY();
}

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:

function thisX(args){
SomeCode;
SomeCode;
return Var;
}
function thisY(arg

A Step in a direction

[vaderhelmet (591186)]

I'm not a huge fan of Flash in general. It is too much like FrontPage... A thousand script kiddies to every 1 intelligent user. However, I believe a closer interaction and level of support for scripting languages that are shared between standard HTML pages and embedded objects will simplify (and hopefully speed up) development. ECMA Script is a very powerful tool in the right hands and Flash has some very interesting capabilities when paired with the Flash Media Server [adobe.com] or Red5 [osflash.org] (OSS) My 7 cents.

It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey

[by Anonymous Coward]

This is really great news, assuming Mozilla can get over their "Not Invented Here" syndrome (see: Linux distros required to verify their patches with Mozilla) and replace SpiderMonkey (the current Mozilla JS engine) with it. Almost all the problems people have with excessive CPU use are related to the JS engine. Firefox's backend uses a LOT of JavaScript (not kidding!) and it can greatly slow the browser down, especially when there are a lot of extensions running.

This is great news - assuming it replaces

Re:It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey

[Rescate (688702)]

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

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.

There's a detailed commentary

[henni16 (586412)]

..on the issue by Mozilla Foundation's executive director: Frank Hecker's blog [hecker.org]

JIT for javascript

[augustm (147506)]

Reading the various explanations on mozilla sites-
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

[md17 (68506)]

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

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 [kaourantin.net]

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 /. FUD away. ;)

Adobe needs to open the plugin's source...

[mi (197448)]

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

[springMute (873579)]

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 [adobe.com]:

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.

GREAT news for OpenLaszlo, Firefox and AJAX!

[SimHacker (180785)]

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

What is OpenLaszlo "Legals" [openlaszlo.org]?

"Legals" is an OpenLaszlo project to provide a single application environment that supports multiple deployment runtimes. OpenLaszlo 3.x supports Flash 7 and 8 now, but Legals will extend that reach to include DHTML as well as Flash 9. And with the necessary infrastructure in place, we anticipate further runtimes will be developed by the OpenLaszlo community.

The OpenLaszlo "Legals" project began at the start of 2006. We are projecting final availability by the end of the year. Developers interested in helping make Legals a reality are invited to contact us. Developers wishing to get a head-start building applications on top of Legals will be able to do so with our beta release in a few months.

Many people ask about the back story for the project name. The name, Legals, is a tribute to a well-known local restaurant [legalseafoods.com] in Boston where a lunch meeting inspired the team to launch this project.

See Legals FAQ [openlaszlo.org] for commonly asked questions and answers.

The Architecture

With Legals, the OpenLaszlo architecture is being remodularized into a true multi-runtime platform. OpenLaszlo generates script source that is compatible with ECMAScript Release 3, while leveraging extensions from ECMAScript Release 4. From there, multiple compiler backends generate JavaScript in the native dialect of the destination runtime: ActionScript 2 or 3, JScript 5.6, JavaScript 1.4+, and so on.

The OpenLaszlo runtime library is being refactored into two parts: multiple kernels containing runtime-specific code, and a cross-runtime library written in standard ECMA-3. As part of the runtime library, the OpenLaszlo class system has been rewritten in ECMA-3 and includes several innovative new features.

The OpenLaszlo runtime library delivers a common baseline of functionality across all supported runtimes. This gives the developer a rich environment in which to build full-featured web applications. In addition, Legals will include runtime-specific extensions so t

Open Source Compiler

[mjbkinx (800231)]

The ActionScript compiler isn't open source (but available for free as in beer), but haXe [haxe.org] is. It's not ECMA262 v4, but a relative with some additional goodies, like its type system. It can compile for FlashPlayer 9, among other platforms, which uses the VM now known as Tamarin.

Re:And evil hackers everywhere rejoice...

[starwed (735423)]

Actually, at the end of the day this sounds like it will increase security. Since Adobe and Mozilla plan to share exactly the same codebase, whereas now they maintain them seperately, that's one less surface to attack. And presumably having more people working on the same thing can't harm security either.

Re:

[starwed (735423)]

No, you don't have this clear. This doesn't have much to do with flash at all. The only thing entering the mozilla code base is an EMCAscript VM. Flash will also use the same VM, and they'll enhance/maintain that VM jointly.

Benchmarks

[mjbkinx (800231)]

Tamarin vs. SpiderMonkey 1.7 [playercore.com].

Re:

[Fordiman (689627)]

It's called an update. Most likely, legacy ECMAScript (the 'JavaScript' you've been using since 1999, per ECMA-262) will work just as it always has. My guess is that Tamarin is going to have speed and syntax optimizations.

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