November 6th, 2006
Adobe partners with Mozilla by open sourcing a core part of the Flash Player
Adobe is announcing a very interesting partnership with the Mozilla Foundation today. Adobe has been good about dipping its toes into the open source waters with a lot of their ActionScript 3 API releases and the free Flex 2 SDK. But this time, they seem to think that the water is the right temperature, because they decided to go for the cannonball and are contributing source code from the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Specifically, they are contributing some of the Just In-Time compiler (JIT) code open sourcing the entire ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) that lies at the core of the Flash Player and handles all of the ActionScript interpreting.
The resulting splash comes in the form of the Tamarin project, which will implement the newest version of the ECMAScript 4th Edition and be used in Mozilla's SpiderMonkey, which is the JavaScript engine that is used in Firefox as well as other Mozilla projects.
So what does this mean? Well the new ActionScript Virtual Machine has been making people in the Flash world very happy campers. The performance compared to the old VM is outstanding, and it has enabled Flash developers to deploy full applications without most of the performance hits that you would have seen under the old Flash Player. The reason behind this is the just-in-time compiler which takes the ActionScript-translated bytecode and turns it into native machine code at runtime which makes code run much faster. As a result of Adobe's contribution, JavaScript can now run on this same Just In-Time compiler, which means we'll see a huge performance increase for Ajax applications.
But perhaps the most important implication from the announcement is what it does for the open source community. By contributing some of the JIT code, pulling the covers off of the AVM, they're opening up a core part of the Flash Player. That's not to say that we will see hundreds of different Flash Players out there from the open source community, but it does make ActionScript 3 a very interesting technology from the standpoint of open source projects. Adobe has been a member of the ECMA committee for a while now, but this really puts them front and center when it comes to the next generation of scripting for the web. With this, ActionScript is poised to become the standard for the next version of ECMAScript.
I can't wait to see what the open source community does with the code. This is a big step for both Mozilla and Adobe, but I think it is a win-win because it allows Adobe to show off their technological advancements, and Mozilla gets an excellent JIT compiler for the next version of Firefox and other Mozilla technologies. If you are interested in testing the waters, Brendan Eich and Kevin Lynch will be chatting about the news on Mozilla's IRC channel at 10:00 AM on Tuesday, November 7. More info is on the Mozilla Dev center.
Ryan Stewart, a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst, recently joined Adobe's Platform Team as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist. full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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