My Ajax Experience West keynote covers a lot of ground, with slant-wise truth telling the over-arching theme. Mozilla believes in fairly radical open source action, including open strategy. In that spirit, three new projects, the first already known via jresig:
ActionMonkey, the project to join forces between SpiderMonkey and Tamarin, being driven by Jason Orendorff with Edward Lee and some old-timers and newcomers lending a hand. The first stage of development integrates MMgc into SpiderMonkey as a replacement for SpiderMonkey’s GC. (NB: the wannabe mascot has a day job.)
IronMonkey, the project to map IronPython and IronRuby to Tamarin, so that Tamarin becomes multi-lingual, over time delivering high performance for all languages. This effort is being spearheaded by Seo Sanghyeon (whose last name I apologize for misspelling — or for using a different spelling of, at any rate — in my slides). The idea is to make use of the MsPL-licensed open source that Microsoft has kindly given the world, and tend necessary changes or additional code in downstream truly-open repositories that can accept patches from non-MS employees, such as FePy.
ScreamingMonkey, the project to add browser-specific script-engine glue to Tamarin, enabling it as a <script> tag handler in other browsers, starting with IE. Mark Hammond is leading this charge. Where it will end, one can only speculate. At a minimum, if you have Tamarin installed on your system in the future, you may need only a small download to plug it into other browsers. Best case, it comes with all the relevant glue in its main distribution. We’ll see.
I’m excited to announce these projects. They address various concerns voiced by bloggers of the form “what about other languages?” and “what about IE?”. Comments welcome.
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