Web 2.0 In Depth

Adobe Systems, owners of the Flash Player currently installed on over 700 million Internet connected desktops and mobile devices worldwide, will contribute the player's source code to the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla will in turn use the code to host a new open source project called "Tamarin."

Adobe's Dan Smith, Tamarin module owner, is one of 11 core team members of the Tamarin project. With no fewer than seven out of eleven members from Adobe, the team includes the creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich (pictured), and Edwin Smith, Tamarin creator and VM architect.

Overall the goal is to implement a high-performance, open source implementation of the ECMAScript 4th edition (ES4) language specification. Adobe and Mozilla hope to thereby accelerate the adoption of a standard language for creating engaging Web applications

The Tamarin project is just getting started so the roadmap is not yet fully developed, but some of the technical goals include:

1. Integrating the Tamarin VM and garbage collector within SpiderMonkey
2. Using the SpiderMonkey compiler to generate code for Tamarin
3. Porting the just-in-time compiler to new hardware platforms
4. Completing the self-hosting ECMAScript 4 compiler

In other words the Tamarin virtual machine will be used by Mozilla within SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox, and other products based on Mozilla technology. The code will continue to be used by Adobe as part of the ActionScript Virtual Machine within Adobe Flash Player.

One senior developer, Martin Blanco, has already blogged that "This is good news, though Flash is (fairly) accessible via JavaScript, any shortcuts that can sort out security, memory and other problems are always welcome."

Blanco adds:

"For me the solution that Flash would bring to any AJAX application would be a graphical one. You can have a myriad of nice animations when using the new line of JavaScript libraries, such as scriptaculous, etc. But there are still obstacles with browser and platform compatibility."

"A not so distant future example," Blanco continues, "would go something like this: say you have a lovely little code snippet that to drag and drop an item in a shopping cart. It’s all working well in the background, server speaking to the client, all good. So you go that little bit extra, you decide to add a nifty animation that makes a currency sign flash as the item is placed on the cart, user interface and all that. Check it on Firefox, (ka-ching!) nice so far. Test it on IE, and the animation does not look right, too slow, something is off… Back to smacking your head on the DOM reference."

"By doing the animation as a Flash object, both browsers would be looking at the same exact animation, no compromise or extra code needed."

"Hopefully in the future," Bianco concludes, "we will see a new version of Prototype with added Flash functionality, where not only can you drag layers, but animate them knowing they really will be the same on all browsers (well, at least on standard complying ones)."

Another question is naturally: where does the Apollo runtime from Adobe fit into all this? The timing/location of the announcement, the Web 2.0 Summit, strongly suggests that Adobe has seen that Web 2.0 offers it a further chance to catch up other giants like Apple and Microsoft, by "freeing" people from the OSes run by either company.

Web 2.0 Journal readers can find more info at: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin.