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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.
Mozilla Programming The Internet
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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[+] 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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  • Go open source go! (Score:1)

    by AxXium (964226) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:26AM (#16750953)
    Go open source go! This is great news for us Linux geeks. :)
  • AJAX in Flash, with a Web 2.0 hype engine. May god have mercy on us all.

  • Jumping the Gun (Score:2, Informative)

    by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:27AM (#16750969)
    (http://slashdot.org/~eldavojohn/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @03:26PM)
    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 reading the project site, nowhere do they claim to be trying to open up Flash. Instead, it looks like they're going to re-implement the engine (tried before [osflash.org]):
    The goal of the "Tamarin" project is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification.
    ECMAScript [wikipedia.org] version four is the language used by Flash, buy it could possibly be a derivative of Flash or an attempt to emulate Flash. Flex is an example of Adobe coaxing developers to use MXML and ActionScript and I suspect that this open source engine is no different. I imagine that it will lack the libraries and features of the licensed Flash Studio so that the developers will have to code a lot of the normal effect engines from scratch. Net effect, developers are given a little more freedom in coding and Adobe becomes the standard like they did with PDF. It looks like they're losing money on Studio licenses but instead they're cementing their stake in technology by offering basic services free and premium services at a ... well ... premium. Similar to what Google is doing and what Microsoft is learning. You know, like a heroin dealer the first few tricks are free but to get extra you gotta pony up.

    • Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:40AM (#16751109)
      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.
      [ Parent ]
      • Re:Jumping the Gun by HeroreV (Score:1) Tuesday November 07 2006, @06:27PM

      • Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:59AM (#16752173)

        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 ]
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • Re:Jumping the Gun by splict (Score:1) Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:52AM
    • Re:Jumping the Gun by coyote4til7 (Score:3) Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:13AM
    • Re:Jumping the Gun by springMute (Score:1) Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:19AM
    • Re:Jumping the Gun by ccr65 (Score:1) Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:28AM
      • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
    • ECMAScript != Flash by msobkow (Score:2) Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:42AM
    • 2 replies beneath your current threshold.
  • ...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?

  • And evil hackers everywhere rejoice... (Score:1)

    by 0x537461746943 (781157) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:33AM (#16751031)
    tt the thought of yet another way to attack your web browser.

  • Please add multithreading (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:33AM (#16751037)
    Javascripts single-threaded design is the biggest roadblock on the way to a web-app platform.

  • A Step in a direction (Score:3, Informative)

    by vaderhelmet (591186) <mailNO@SPAMjspencer.net> on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:35AM (#16751055)
    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 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:36AM (#16751063)
    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 SpiderMonkey. The current JS engine in Mozilla is amazingly slow.

  • Web 2.0... (Score:1)

    by WarpSnotTheDark (997032) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:36AM (#16751069)
    Hmmmm. CMP Media is driving this thing...or O'Riley Media? I'm so confused.

  • There's a detailed commentary (Score:5, Informative)

    by henni16 (586412) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:40AM (#16751117)
    ..on the issue by Mozilla Foundation's executive director: Frank Hecker's blog [hecker.org]

  • JIT for javascript (Score:3, Interesting)

    by augustm (147506) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:49AM (#16751209)
    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

  • So have I got this clear now? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:56AM (#16751281)
    When Adobe does Flash its shit, bloated, resource hogging intrusiveness. When Mozilla does Flash its empowering and innovative.
  • 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. ;)

  • 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 Linux, where native plugins are supplied by Adobe, it would allow bolder changes in the browser/plugin APIs (changes that may break the ABI).

    For example, Real has gone "all the way" and open-sourced their entire player (except for a few codecs). This allowed to fish out their plugin code, build it natively and use it with Real's own Linux executables (and full set of codecs), wherever that can run (such as FreeBSD/amd64).

  • Take it easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by springMute (873579) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:05AM (#16751431)
    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.

  • Request, Please. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by LifesABeach (234436) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:11AM (#16751503)
    What are Mozilla's intentions now with respect to SVG [carto.net]? One can not ignore that the specification of SVG [w3.org] with respect to Adobe's Flash [adobe.com] product. To my thinking, SVG [slashdot.org], or its spawn, is the direction of future web developement.

  • ECMAScript... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Bizzeh (851225) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:52AM (#16752067)
    (http://www.bizzeh.com/)
    ...needs a less stupid name
  • 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?

  • Mozarella Foundation (Score:1)

    by DonZorro (452879) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @12:07PM (#16753341)
    The headline at inquirer reads "Adobe Hands Mozarella Foundation Flash Code"

    http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35 584 [theinquirer.net]

  • No 64 bit version (Score:2)

    by obender (546976) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @01:54PM (#16754855)
    From Tinic's blog:

    # If you study the source code you'll realize that a 64bit port is NOT a recompile away. We are actively working on the 64bit port, the source code right now is still 32bit until the changes required are stabilized.
    Is this a gift to Mozilla or is it: please fix it for us?

  • Yes, this is nice... (Score:1)

    by jo42 (227475) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @03:01PM (#16756117)
    (http://127.0.0.42/)
    ...but when can I have it for IE6 and/or IE7?

  • GREAT news for OpenLaszlo, Firefox and AJAX! (Score:4, Informative)

    by SimHacker (180785) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @03:08PM (#16756253)
    (http://www.donhopkins.com/ | Last Journal: Monday February 23 2004, @09:48AM)

    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

  • Flash is DRM in disguise (Score:1)

    by macraig (621737) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:45PM (#16762867)
    (http://macraig.homedns.org/blog/)
    Flash is just a sneaky way of implementing a form of DRM for Web documents, since it can hide or obfuscate source files that would otherwise have been directly accessible under good old HTML. The real "Web 2.0" is one we need to WORRY about and fear, not herald... the real Web 2.0 will be one based upon information-restrictive technologies like Flash. HTML was designed with "open source" in mind... can any form of Flash-like Web interface ever truly be called open source? Do we really want to continue to encourage this form of Web design? Personally, I avoid any Web site which is entirely designed with Flash.

  • Keep Mozilla Away from IE! (Score:1)

    by cogno64 (970283) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:54PM (#16762949)
    (http://cognitivelabs.com/ | Last Journal: Monday February 12 2007, @11:49PM)
    Click on the dialog box to start [cognitivelabs.com]!

  • The title just changed! (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2006, @09:28AM (#16750971)
    It was "Adobe and Mozilla to Open Source Flash" when it went live.
    [ Parent ]

  • Re:Holy crap (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 07 2006, @10:12AM (#16751515)
    Sheesh, but why do they have to keep reinventing the wheel? Why create some ECMAScript that no one has heard of? Why not just work on Javascript?? ;)
    [ Parent ]

  • Re:Holy crap (Score:2)

    by SirTalon42 (751509) on Tuesday November 07 2006, @05:26PM (#16758947)
    WebKit is actually free software. WebKit is Apple's fork of KHTML (Konqueror's and KDE's rendering engine).
    [ Parent ]
  • 7 replies beneath your current threshold.

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