Obviously I've been following and thinking about Adobe and their plans for web development. At the same time I've chosen a different route, with the open web standards of HTML, CSS, and javascript. Adobe Flash and Flex and AIR are some seriously cool tools that give you access to very rich features and, comparatively, a lot of speed. These two different paths are obviously in competition (if not economic, at least for developer hearts and minds,) but they are also closely related. Adobe has clearly been moving to make javascript a first class citizen in it's environments (for instance, you can build AIR apps with all javascript and zero actionscript.)

And this makes me wonder about Tamarin, which is an open source project that is Adobe's contribution to Mozilla. The basic point is to make javascript really fast. Which is great. And great for Adobe since they are now leveraging javascript in their development world.

But I wonder if they are rethinking their decision in light of the progress that projects like EXTjs have made building a development framework on top of pure HTML, CSS and javascript. Sure it will never have all the rich features of the Adobe environments, but some constraints are not always a bad thing (especially where those constraints force you to use the native widgets people expect to see on the web, and to build regular web pages that work the way people expect.) Plus the technology is all open and free for the developer. But there is a real issue, and that's speed. EXTjs (as well as any of the others like jQuery, YUI, prototype/scriptalicious, etc...) apps are slow compared to their rich Adobe conterparts. Really slow in some cases.

In the future, no doubt, this won't matter so much. Our computers will keep getting faster. And then there is Tamarin out there on the horizon ready to supercharge javascript 2. Which brings me back to my question. Why would Adobe want to contribute Tamarin? Seems like a radical speed up of javascript is going to make EXTjs et al much more competitive with Adobe's projects.
- jim 10-04-2007 5:13 pm




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