Tamarin Project -- Adobe contributes to Mozilla

This is older news, but certainly worthy of repeating (now that I have a couple free hours to get my thoughts out).

If you're interested in where the future of client-side software development is going, definitely read this post and the related link from Ajaxian.com. It discusses 'Tamarin', which is a collaborative project between Adobe and Mozilla -- Adobe contributed source code from the ActionScript Virtual Machine to the Mozilla Foundation.

What all of this means, as Brendan Eich states "now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser"

Especially insightful are the 'comments' section, where Brendan Eich (the individual who created the JavaScript language and one of the first people at Netscape, now the Chief Technology Officer at Mozilla, responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla) , explains the nature of performance gains that will come from a Just-In-Time JavaScript compiler.

http://hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-tamarin

All of this gives us insight into the web-centric paradigm that both Adobe and Mozilla (along with obviously Google and others) are pointed towards and that has huge momentum. This collaboration, along with items like Adobe Apollo (and other similar efforts by Sun, for instance), make it very motivating time to be a web application developer. We are at the beginning of a time pointing towards being able to create deeply rich web applications -- apps that run efficiently in a browser that is continually increasing in performance. These web applications can be programmed and run in a web-connected or disconnected mode.

The Ajax libraries and toolsets that have sprung up in the last few years (E.g. Prototype, Dojo, et al), along with the advancement of the browser itself, collaborations between Open Source and industry (Adobe, JVM and Flex), and many of the open source communities supporting this vision for the future of the web really gets me excited and motivated to wake up and write code, and dig deeper each day into the nuances of these technologies. Good times-

(ps, here is another good read: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2007/04/openness.html)