Code Monkeys with Tamarin
Some years ago, the Internet users were amazed by the power of Flash and now the world is stumbling upon this new AJAX thing making web pages even more user friendly (and fast!). Another new technologies are also being released like Silverlight and AIR and some others are being prepared, like JaxaFX.
Well, with new standards getting ready like HTML 5.0 and XHTML 2.0, I believe a new generation of client-side scripting will emerge. The projects I feel the most promising are the ones related with the Tamarin Virtual Machine. For those who don’t know, this is the result of the contribution Adobe made, giving Mozilla the source code of Action-Script Virtual Machine. Joining the best of two worlds, Tamarin will have support for both JavaScript and ActionScript.
The first subproject, Action Monkey will integrate Tamarin with SpiderMonkey (the Mozilla’s C implementation of JavaScript). The second, ScreamingMonkey will allow the Tamarin to be run on other browsers, like IE what means portability of the code. The third, IronMonkey will allow Tamarin mapping through IronPython and IronRuby. Regarding this last one, as an OpenSource foundation, Mozilla should be using Python and Ruby rather than Microsoft’s ones.
All of this will be released with SpiderMonkey and Firefox next year. Can’t wait to try and make some nice looking applications with it :)
Shadowfiend
So the question really becomes `what about Java bytecodes?' More specifically, there is both an JRuby and a Jython. Then again, I don't know that JRuby compiles to bytecode the way that IronRuby intends to. The same goes for Jython.