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."
Please add multithreading (Score:3, Insightful)
This can't be a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:And evil hackers everywhere rejoice... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So have I got this clear now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This can't be a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:This can't be a good thing. (Score:2, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.