Adobe donates Flash code to Mozilla

By Tom Sanders on Nov 9, 2006 9:48 AM
Filed under Software

ActionScript virtual machine contribution expected to speed up Web 2.0
development.

Adobe has donated its ActionScript Virtual Machine code to the Mozilla Foundation, kicking off a new open source project dubbed Tamarin.

Tamarin will be a component of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine for Mozilla's Firefox browser.

ActionScript offers a scripting language for Adobe's Flash player. Flash technology is best known for its use by online video websites such as YouTube and Google Video. The language is similar to JavaScript and Microsoft's JScript.

Adobe and Mozilla expect the donation to speed up the creation of a standards-based scripting language, as well as promote the creation of online applications and increase their performance on Firefox.

Scripting languages are at the core of today's Web 2.0 applications. The Ajax technology that forms the basis of Gmail and Flickr, for instance, is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.

The Adobe contribution is the largest code donation that Mozilla has received in its three-year history.