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Yesterday Adobe announced a partnership with the Mozilla Foundation to open source the script engine behind Adobe's popular Flash player 9.0. Mozilla will host the new project, dubbed Tamarin, and hopes accelerate the development of a standards-based platform for creating innovative and engaging Web 2.0 applications.
Browser incapability is the scourge of the web. Websites that work well in one browser don't work well in others, costing companies extra money and causing confusing for consumers. Adobe is hoping to lead the way to better Web 2.0.
Flickr, YouTube and other big web 2.0 companies rely on technologies like AJAX and Flash to provide their services. Adobe's open-source code will enable web 2.0 developers to further innovation and provide users with an improved internet experience.
"We believe that in the long term this will help spur even more innovation in web 2.0 applications," says Pam Deziel, director of product marketing at Adobe.
Prior to Adobe's announcement, each browser manufacturer has relied on their own script rendering engines and differences between them make development difficult for web 2.0 companies.
With so many companies concurrently developing similar tools, Adobe felt it was time to unify the community's efforts. "We hope this will benefit the entire developer community by providing a more uniform language for apps," Deziel says.
Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer at Adobe, adds, "This being open source, we're hoping that developers will be able to give users exactly the same experience in all the browsers."
Although the project will be hosted by the Mozilla Foundation, the code is open-source which means other browsers like Opera, Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, can incorporate the code into their projects.
The eight hundred pound gorilla not in the room is Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Deziel says Adobe "would love to work with Microsoft... having a uniform language across FireFox, Internet Explorer and Flash would be a positive thing." Microsoft has yet to comment on Adobe's announcement.
Adobe's release of the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), does not mean that the popular Adobe Flash Player is open source. The Flash Player, used extensively by popular sites like YouTube, remains a proprietary Adobe product.
The code that runs Flash applications, called ActionScript, has long been based on an standard known as ECMASCript. ECMAScript is also the basis of Sun's Javascript, the primary tool of AJAX developers.
As a result of Adobe's ASV release, Javascript can now take advantage of the same scripting engine which will provide a huge performance increase for Ajax applications. Adobe claims their script engine is up to ten times faster than the one currently used by FIrefox.
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the following paragraph consists of stock quotes pulled directly from mozilla's press release... not sure how wired feels about such things (i.e. every story on the subject likely has these quotes)
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"Adobe's work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception," said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. According to Eich, web developers now have access to "a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser."
The Mozilla Foundation plans to release a version of Firefox incorporating the new ActionScript VM code sometime in 2008.
Applications that could benefit from Adobe's code are not limited to just traditional web browsers. The biggest outcome of Adobe's announcement may well be in the mobile sector. YouTube is rumored to be in talks with Verizon about a mobile version of the popular video sharing site which would likely benefit from performance improvements. A unified delivery platform with greatly improved performance could open even more doors for the still largely untapped mobile and handheld markets.
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