In the bustle of announcements surrounding OSCON, Blackhat, and the Ajax Experience one single, incredibly important, announcement was made: The introduction of two new Mozilla projects: IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey.

The critical, core, component of this is the Tamarin virtual machine (which is an Open Sourced version of the ActionScript Virtual Machine that powered the Adobe Flash Player). Tamarin already supports ECMAScript 3 (and, thusly, JavaScript, ActionScript, and JScript) and parts of the upcoming ECMAScript 4 specification.

Briefly, since they’re both still under planning, here’s what IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey are setting out to achieve.

IronMonkey is setting out with the goal of mapping Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language (CIL) to ActionScript Byte Code (ABC), allowing additional language implementations, such as IronPython and IronRuby, to run in the Tamarin Virtual Machine.

IronPython and IronRuby are implementations of Python and Ruby, respectively, that runs on .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) (and, incidentally, also on Mono), written in C#.

IronRuby is built on top of the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)… DLR will ship as part of the Common Language Runtime (CLR) in the future…

To break all of this down: There are implementations of Python and Ruby that are capable of being compiled down to a Common Intermediate Language, which will then be able to be run on Tamarin via IronMonkey.

This is a huge, huge, deal. This means that JavaScript will no longer be the only viable scripting language in browsers that use that Tamarin engine. At the very least, there’ll be two more languages to work with. However, if IronMonkey works out well, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see an implementation of PHP that runs in the browser.

Tamarin being able to run JavaScript 2, Python, and Ruby really doesn’t mean a whole lot (to the general web-developer public) if the languages don’t work in all modern browsers (even though it’ll give development on the Mozilla platform a considerable boost). This is where ScreamingMonkey comes into play.

ScreamingMonkey is the effort, being led by Mark Hammond, to allow the Tamarin engine to run within non-Mozilla browsers, starting with Internet Explorer.

Unfortunately, the Internet Explorer team is caught up fixing bugs in their existing ECMAScript implementation (JScript), thus their likelihood of implementing ECMAScript 4, in a reasonable time frame, is slim to none.

The result of this effort will be for a developer to be able to reference ECMAScript 4 or JavaScript 2 from a script tag and have it load a required plugin in order to execute it, for example:

<script type="application/ecmascript;version=4">...</script>

or:

<script type="application/javascript;version=2">...</script>

There’s a detailed plan of attack laid out and it will require a lot of work. The end result still needs to be actualized, but it will most likely be in the form of a standalone Tamarin runtime (possibly embedded in another distribution) that will be able to hook into its relevant browsers.

As with IronMonkey, this is a huge announcement. This immediately helps to give credence to using the upcoming JavaScript 2 language as its cross-browser support is practically assured. While we’re still a long ways off from being able to use this particular project, the result of it will surely be incredible.

Regardless of the outcome of either one of these projects, it’s obvious that browser scripting is beginning to shift in some appreciable ways. Although, should these projects succeed the resulting effect upon the web development industry will be incalculable.