I'm not a big Adobe fan, and I've always been against Flash if there are any other ways to get the job done, but it does seem like there are a lot of interesting things going on. As the web moves towards a more richly interactive design (AJAXified web 2.0 stuff) maybe Flash starts to make more sense?

In any case, Adobe just made a huge contribution to the Mozilla project that is scheduled to pay off sometime in 2008: Tamarin Project. From the blog of one of the engineers:
Today Adobe announced that the EMCAScript 4 compatible virtual machine in the Adobe Flash Player has been contributed to the Mozilla project under the name Tamarin. It is the single largest contribution to the Mozilla foundation since its inception and consist of about 135.000 lines of source code. The engine is fully open source using the standard Mozilla license, with the Mozilla foundation retaining full ownership.
Tamarin will allow for Mozilla (and therefore Firefox) to easily move to javascript 2. And while I'm always a little nervous about Flash (and javascript for that matter) I'm also getting impatient for more powerful scripting tools and this is probably the way we are going to get them. So I'm staying hopeful and will watch this.
- jim 11-07-2006 6:50 pm
back to Jim Bassett's Weblog

Simon Willison explains a bit more about Tamarin:

Even in these buzzword filled days of Ajax and Web 2.0, JavaScript is still seen as a poor cousin to so-called "real" programming languages. With a high performance open-source VM like Tamarin available, maybe more developers will start to re-examine JavaScript's role outside the browser.

- jim 11-09-2006 4:46 pm


More detailed look at Tamarin
- jim 11-10-2006 7:02 pm





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