Tidbits from the developer chat - 64bit Flash, open source Player and XUL/MXML

I just finished sitting in on the Mozilla developer chat with Brendan Eich and Kevin Lynch regarding today's announcement by Adobe that they are open sourcing the ActionScript Virtual Machine and contributing it to the Mozilla Foundation (my coverage here).

Now, quick disclaimer, a lot of these are pretty vague statements but nonetheless, it was very interesting to see just how open to some possibilities Adobe is and what they seem to think about this partnership.

The issue of a lack of 64 bit Flash came up and specifically how it was going to affect Tamarin. But now that the AVM is open source, I asked Kevin Lynch what it would mean for the Flash Player if the community added 64 bit support to the AVM. He responded "that would certainly help get to 64 bit sooner (of course there is more work in progress as well beyond the VM on this too)". It seems like Adobe is very interested in what the community will do and how that helps them support more platforms.

Eric Jung asked the always-loaded question about open sourcing the Player. I've heard this question a lot, but I haven't ever heard a response like Kevin gave - "we just open sourced the virtual machine in Flash here, which is the biggest open source step so far at Adobe -- I am sure we will learn a lot from this and then will see what might make sense next". Now obviously this isn't a roadmap for open sourcing the player, and Kevin may have been feeding a very open-source-centric crowd here, but I was surprised at how candid he was. This is an experiment for Adobe, but that experiment could have very significant ramifications in the long term, so I hope the community embraces that.

The last thing that really piqued my interest was a question from plasticmillion about any potential for harmonization of XUL, Mozilla's extension language, and MXML, the language that Flex uses. From Brendan and Kevin:

[11:46] kevinlynch: there is always potential for harmonization :)
[11:46] brendan: many XUL folks saw similarity in MXML, at widget and layout model levels
[11:46] brendan: which matter more than superficial XML vocab
[11:47] brendan: i think we could harmonize XUL and MXML so that either vocab could map onto either runtime (XULRunner or Flash Player)
[11:47] brendan: if anyone is interested in this, please mail me

Now THAT would be very cool - being able to map the language to either runtime. That would open up both platforms to a lot more developers and open up some interesting use cases for Flex applications that work with Mozilla extensions.

I'll see about trying to post the entire chat log because I think there are a lot of valuable items there for both JavaScript developers and Flash developers. After the seeing the responses, it seems obvious to me that this is a deep partnership that has a lot of potential down the road. What's great is that the open source community can help lock in some of that potential and help both Mozilla and Adobe in a big way.