ECMAScript, ES4 and ES-Harmony
You may have heard the changes afoot in ECMAScript and the proposed successor versions to the current ECMA-262 standard. After a couple of years slaving over a new revision called ES4 and much infighting, the ECMA TC399 group has announced a significant change of strategy. The previous ES4 proposal is no more and in its place, is a yet to be defined new direction called “ES-Harmony“. The previously fighting factions are unified, but at a loss of the driving force of Adobe. Funny, that you need quite a bit of disharmony to get Harmony. Read Brendan Eich’s thoughts.
Adobe had provided much of the initial design impetus for ES4 by contributing the Tamarin VM and much of the ActionScript language design into ES4. So to lose Adobe’s energy and ideas will be a big loss. Sure adobe will continue to be involved, (read the Official Line), but don’t expect them to drive the new direction. I expect that ActionScript will continue to adopt many of the good things from the ES4 design and to track ES-Harmony when it delivers. As a result, ActionScript will get stronger not weaker. Freed from the burden of a committee standards process, they will certainly deliver sooner rather than later.
Ejscript and ES-Harmony
How does this all relate to our Ejscript which is an implementation of Javascript for non-browser use (think Mobile, Server side web frameworks and embedded). Well, Ejscript is one of the most advanced implementations of ES4 and already includes most of the big advances of ES4. It supports classes, interfaces, modules, namespaces, early binding, optional type annotations and many of the smaller proposals in ES4. It is a very sweet language to use. However, ES4 is no more and ES-Harmony is quite a way off into the future, so Ejscript will continue to innovate and explore creative improvements to Javascript. We will track “ES-Harmony” and adopt proposals as they become firm. But our focus will be on delivering real technology and making Ejscript the best non-browser implementation of the future of Javascript.
In the meantime, Ejscript is the way to explore the new directions of Javascript today.
17 Aug 2008 mob
Hi Michael,
Your assessment of Adobe’s position with respect to ActionScript and
ECMAScript is right on! We are currenty looking at what features of ES4 will
give our users the most bang for their buck. You are also right that ES4 as
expressed in EJScript and ActionScript is a pretty nice language.
You’ve probably seen this but just in case your reader’s haven’t, here’s a
nice example of ES4 in action:
http://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-central/index.cgi/file/d92e466aed84/esc/src/
It’s an ES4 compiler written in ES4.
Congratulations on your release of EJScript (the code is very clean!). I
look forward to reading much news of its success.
Regards,
Jeff Dyer
Adobe Systems
Thanks for the feedback. We love clean code and it will only get tighter and simpler as we drive to release. Sometimes deleting code is more satisfying than writing
[...] [...]
Ejscript sounds great, but I guess some people are only interested in JavaScript “inside a browser”. No one’s going to hold their breath for cross-browser JS2 support, so I created JASPA.
AS3 is a nice language indeed and JASPA brings an almost identical syntax to regular browser-based JS development. http://jaspa.org.uk/