That’s right, Adobe has made a move to open source code from their ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), which is the powerful scripting engine used in the Adobe Flash Player. A very big contribution, it bodes well for web designers, web developers, and dare I say, all Internet users in general. In fact, I might be so bold as to say, with the works of Apollo in the mix, this move may also help application developers and computer users alike…but that’s a whole other post :)
For those of you that are unfamiliar as to what this all means, I’ll take some time to break it down. I’ll start with some background.
ActionScript is the programming language used in Adobe technologies such as Flex and Flash. The ActionScript Virtual Machine is the scripting engine used in the Flash Player. Particularly, the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2, or AVM2, is the scripting engine used in Adobe’s latest Flash Player, Flash Player 9. Actionscript is also an ECMAScript-based language (i.e. based on the ECMAScript language specification, 3rd edition), just as is JavaScript. If you’ve worked with either, you know that they are quite similar. So, ActionScript and JavaScript are closely related languages.
What Adobe has done is they have contributed source code from their new AVM2 to the Mozilla Foundation (now under the project name, Tamarin) with the goal that making this code open source will accelerate and grow the ECMAScript 4 Standard language specification (ES4). That’s great, if you ask me!
What does it mean for us developers?
With the efficiency and performance advances that we have with AVM2, we can expect to see this for the new JavaScript engine as well. So, previously demanding JavaScript applications may become more feasible (including AJAX applications).
Aside from performance, there are also many language features that we see with ActionScript 3.0 that are desirable in JavaScript. As they develop ES4, we can expect that JavaScript and ActionScript (already closely related), will become even more similar, so a developer can leverage the knowledge of working with either language. This standardization across languages means that our work can reach more browsers, more sites, more machines, more people. Even further, we might be able to expect developer libraries and tools that can be re-used and applied for JavaScript AND ActionScript. So, I can develop a library in ActionScript for use in Flash, but would also work JavaScript…awesome.
What does it mean for everyone?
On a larger scale, how does this move from Adobe affect everyone else? Well, first of all, working directly with Mozilla, all Internet-users can look forward to future versions of Firefox and Mozilla-based browsers with better performance when running JavaScript- and ActionScript-based applications. Again, with standardization in the languages, there can be better support for these "Web 2.0" technologies.
Most significantly, AJAX, Flex and Flash applications will become more efficient and will become even more common on the internet (I can imagine it shortly becoming a "standard" on new sites), spurring the whole "Web 2.0" buzz.
Conclusion
This is a big move for Adobe to make. It will help grow the developer communities and contribute to Internet-users in general, by "empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world"*. I couldn’t agree more.
*Kevin Lynch, Senior Vice President and Chief Software Architect at Adobe
Charles
There are quite a few open source ActionScript 3.0 libraries that Adobe has…Flickr, YouTube, Mappr, CoreLib, to name a few…and with the addition of the new eBay library (the one used in the San Dimas project), Adobe has decided to make the move from Adobe Labs to Google Code. There are a few reasons for this, but in a nutshell, Google Code is better suited for the open source libraries in terms of collaboration and community involvement. Here’s what’s up now…
