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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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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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Adobe and Mozilla Foundation Collaborate on ECMAScript
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Go open source go! (Score:1)
My......God...... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://obsessivemathsfreak.org/ | Last Journal: Friday June 09 2006, @08:15PM)
Jumping the Gun (Score:2, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/~eldavojohn/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 16, @03:26PM)
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]): 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
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.
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.
If you need an ECMAScript parser.... (Score:4, Informative)
(http://tomcopeland.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)
Re:And evil hackers everywhere rejoice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Please add multithreading (Score:3, Insightful)
A Step in a direction (Score:3, Informative)
It can't be any worse than SpiderMonkey (Score:2, Interesting)
This is great news - assuming it replaces SpiderMonkey. The current JS engine in Mozilla is amazingly slow.
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]:
Web 2.0... (Score:1)
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
So have I got this clear now? (Score:1, Insightful)
Read these before you spread FUD (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.jamesward.org/)
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)
(http://cafepress.com/phototravel?pid=5934485)
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)
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)
ECMAScript... (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.bizzeh.com/)
Actionscript 100 times slower than qbasic (Score:2)
(http://dwedit.home.comcast.net/)
Mozarella Foundation (Score:1)
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
No 64 bit version (Score:2)
Yes, this is nice... (Score:1)
(http://127.0.0.42/)
GREAT news for OpenLaszlo, Firefox and AJAX! (Score:4, Informative)
(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
Flash is DRM in disguise (Score:1)
(http://macraig.homedns.org/blog/)
Keep Mozilla Away from IE! (Score:1)
(http://cognitivelabs.com/ | Last Journal: Monday February 12 2007, @11:49PM)
The title just changed! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Holy crap (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Holy crap (Score:2)