AS / Mozilla

[tg]

this may lead to some very interesting developments.

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/

[jsebrech]

I suspect this is going to cause ecmascript to become one of the standard scripting languages in the open source community. Which is fine for me :)

[tg]

yep. i agree.

and think what it could do for the extensions for ff...

[senocular]

I think a lot of people are making this out to be more than it is... Not that its a small thing, but its ECMAScript, not Flash and a lot of people are thinking FLASH FLASH FLASH! Even if it was Flash, what is FF in the greater scheme of things? When it comes down to getting the job done, it means supporting IE too (flash project-wise). We'll see :)

[tg]

yeah. i getcha here sen, but i find using the flash object model easier then the browser DOM... but thats just me and what im used to, so i hope this will help me do better browser scripting in the future (and your right, as long as its not included in IE, it will be limited).

and keep in mind, how many time in the past has the AS community surpassed the expectations of macromedia's (adobes) engineers in extending the use of AS?

[astgtciv]

It's interesting from a political perspective as well... seems that major industry players are more and more allying themselves with the Open-Source community as a means to oppose Microsoft.

[jsebrech]

This is most definitely not flash, but the fact that the client-side browser paradigm is gradually standardizing on ecmascript 4 is a good thing imho.

I also expect that once FF, opera and safari have ecmascript 4 support, microsoft will be forced to include it in IE due to developer demand (one thing microsoft does well is listen to developers).

[astgtciv]

This sheds some more light on this fascinating subject: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/55457 .

[senocular]

This sheds some more light on this fascinating subject: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/55457 .

...
When Tamarin has implemented the JS2/ES4 spec, Mozilla will use it in FireFox and Adobe will use it in the Flash Player. I don't believe Adobe will need to continue having anything called ActionScript at that point, except perhaps for backward compatibility to play older SWFs. Developers can use the Tamarin implementation of JS2/ES4 for other projects as well.

I don't believe that is accurate. ActionScript will continue to exist and will continue to be separate from any implementation given to the browser as a result of Tamarin. Tamarin will only serve as the "processor" for Browser-side scripting (JavaScript) and will use its own dom separate from Flash's specific to the browser.

In fact, this could have never happened and we might not have seen any differences in the future. I would think ECMAScript 4 would still be implemented in FF; this just makes it a little easier for them to do so.

[astgtciv]

Wow, so many conjectures... well, the poster to flexcoders did state the caveat - perhaps "i believe" there only reflects his personal belief of the path Adobe should take :D

[senocular]

Well, I know who Gordon is (he works here), and I'm surprised to see him say that. I preceeded my statement with "I don't believe" ;) simply because he may something I don't and given his position, I would think he'd know more than I about this. Still, I've seen no indication that the statement I bolded is even remotely true.

[astgtciv]

Oh, I didn't know you worked for Adobe, senocular :D