Adobe and Mozilla Foundation Collaborate on ECMAScript 142
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."
Jumping the Gun (Score:2, Informative)
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
The title just changed! (Score:1, Informative)
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?
A Step in a direction (Score:3, Informative)
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.
There's a detailed commentary (Score:5, Informative)
Help Democracy: +1, Inspirational (Score:0, Informative)
Vote AGAINST Osama bin Laden's employer [whitehouse.org].
From an undisclosed, secure bunker far away from President-VICE Richard B. Cheney's spider-hole [whitehouse.org],
Kilgore Trout
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
Open Source Compiler (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Jumping the Gun (Score:1, Informative)
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]:
Re:This can't be a good thing. (Score:2, Informative)
Benchmarks (Score:3, Informative)
Light PDF parsers: XPDF and Foxit. (Score:2, Informative)
I disagree. KDPF is really nice, and the next version will be impresive. But still theres minimal support for some advanced features, like scripting. Yea, only a subset of users need some byzarre features like that one, but still.. seems that adobe support a lot of these, maybe 99% of what PDF mean.
As a example (scripting) you need a javascript engine, maybe Spidermonkey, and add it to KPDF. Theres actually no javascript engine on KPDF, and adding spidermonkey is somewhat easy, but still is some work to do.
Seems... that is reallly hard to create a good parsing engine for pdf. This why KPDF is based on XPDF and theres only a few PDF viewers. And once you can parse a PDF file and render simple stuff, is enough for 90% of people. But theres still that 10% that use advanced features, that need HUGE ammounts to work.
I only know 3 pdf engines:
- XPDF engine (that KPDF and Evince use). Fast but not complete.
- Foxit engine. Fast but not complete.
- Adobe engine. Slow but complete.
Once you add more features to a application. You need to do more stuff on startup. Maybe init some static arrays, load and parse config files, dynamically call more librarys that also need build stuff...
Imho, theres out here a engineer on Adobe that is frustrated because Adobe reader at core is lighting fast, but all the CRAP that need to load slowdown the whole thing to the actual mud-style.
note to self: Ask the Okula developpers to support CBR.
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