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."

Please add multithreading

[Anonymous Coward]

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

This can't be a good thing.

[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 experienced Acrobat Reader's plugin interacting poorly with various web browsers, including both Internet Explorer and Firefox. There was even that recent problem where it would pop up a modal dialog box behind the main Firefox window, thus rendering it inaccessible, and basically locking up Firefox.

Then we can compare the Mozilla Project's Seamonkey and Firefox browsers to KDE's Konqueror. Konqueror proves to be lean, fast, and memory-efficient. Meanwhile, we routinely hear reports of memory leaks (often blamed on bad extensions or poor caching policies) causing Firefox processes to consume hundreds of MB of RAM. The few times that I have used Firefox, I have run into problems with it crashing.

When two companies with that sort of a track record for putting out bloated, unstable software get together to collaborate, I can't help but think the outcome will be quite poor. At least we do have alternatives, such as KDE. It's those alternatives that I'll continue to use.

So have I got this clear now?

[Timesprout]

When Adobe does Flash its shit, bloated, resource hogging intrusiveness. When Mozilla does Flash its empowering and innovative.

Re:And evil hackers everywhere rejoice...

[starwed]

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:So have I got this clear now?

[starwed]

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.

Re:This can't be a good thing.

[strider44]

The reason why I use firefox instead of konqueror is simple: In firefox I have all the toolbars and required info including menus, navagation buttons and a bar, in one toolbar up the top. Konqueror doesn't yet allow me to do this. I think Konqueror's KHTML is quite neat in programming, but its user interface could still use some work.

Re:Jumping the Gun

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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:This can't be a good thing.

[Maian]

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]

Re:Holy crap

[Fordiman]

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 know that you can do Javascript in an object-oriented manner? Did you know that Flash's ActionScript is just ECMAScript with additional bindings (so is ColdFusions cfScript language)? How about the fact that you can pass inline functions as arguments? Have you ever used the "with" statement? Do you know DOM level 1? XMLHttpRequest? The 'in' clause in 'for'? Prototyped classes?

No, seriously, there's a lot more to Javascript than there used to be, and if you figure out the more advanced features (and how to properly separate behavior, presentation and content), it's actually a pleasant language to work in. I for one welcome the updates and additions to the language that can give 2008's webpages the kick they deserve.