Theres a new primate in town.
On Nov. 8, it became official: Adobe Systems donated source code for its ActionScript Virtual Machine to that open-source champion of the people, the Mozilla Foundation. Mozilla promptly converted it into the Tamarin project, to prop that standard wide open.
What does that mean to you? Well, on the simplest level, it will probably mean a richer, Flash-ier Firefox experience. Before this, ActionScript spoke only to Adobe Flash Player 9. SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine in Mozillas Firefox, is C-based. Now, SpiderMonkey programmers will also have access to ActionScript source code.
With this, added Brendan Eich, chief technology officer of Mozilla, “Web developers have a high-performance, open-source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox Web browser.” Games, movie trailers, and countless graphics programs will move out onto the open seas.
On a deeper level, this may mean a Web-wide revolution. The greater goal of the Tamarin project is to launch a full-fledged ECMAScript Edition 4 standard.