programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment

[goue...@orange.fr]

Hi

I'm a contributor of JogAmp:
http://jogamp.org/

What are the plans to support programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment?

Best regards.

[Alex Jordan]

AFAIK, if a language runs on the web, it will run in Firefox OS, but if it
doesn't, it won't.
You can of course write apps in a language that compiles to JavaScript,
like CoffeeScript.

[goue...@orange.fr]

I assume Firefox OS smartphones won't be delivered with OpenJDK For Embedded but will it be allowed to embed a JVM into applications for Firefox OS? I have worked on my own first person shooter for several years, I can adapt the input handling for devices with touch screens but I won't rewrite it from scratch in Javascript, it would take too much time even though I like the principle of an Open Web.



> Message du 04/07/12 17:07
> De : "Alex Jordan"
> A : goue...@orange.fr
> Copie à : dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment

>
> On Wed, Jul 4, 2012 at 7:39 AM, wrote:
>
> > Hi
> >
> > I'm a contributor of JogAmp:
> > http://jogamp.org/
> >
> > What are the plans to support programming languages *other* than
> > "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment?
> >
> > Best regards.
> >
> AFAIK, if a language runs on the web, it will run in Firefox OS, but if it
> doesn't, it won't.
> You can of course write apps in a language that compiles to JavaScript,
> like CoffeeScript.

> _______________________________________________
> dev-b2g mailing list
> dev...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
>

[Robert Kaiser]

goue...@orange.fr schrieb:

> I assume Firefox OS smartphones won't be delivered with OpenJDK For Embedded but will it be allowed to embed a JVM into applications for Firefox OS? I have worked on my own first person shooter for several years, I can adapt the input handling for devices with touch screens but I won't rewrite it from scratch in Javascript, it would take too much time even though I like the principle of an Open Web.

Anything that is in a plugin is not "the Open Web", as a plugin is a
proprietary backbox inside the web page.

Of course, if you have a JVM that is implemented in JS (we even have
Emscripten that compiles whole C++ codebases to JS, so this idea isn't
too crazy in the end) then I guess you can run Java stuff on B2G.
Without that, I doubt it. I don't think we will ship with *any* plugins
and will not offer any way for plugins to be installed into the OS.

Robert Kaiser

[goue...@orange.fr]

Sorry to contradict you but Icedtea-web is not proprietary:
http://icedtea.classpath.org/wiki/IcedTea-Web

It is under GPL version 2. Thank you for this clarification. If you don't allow plugins


> Message du 05/07/12 14:38
> De : "Robert Kaiser"
> A : mozilla...@lists.mozilla.org
> Copie à :

> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment
>

[Robert Kaiser]

goue...@orange.fr schrieb:

> Sorry to contradict you but Icedtea-web is not proprietary

My use of "proprietary" is in terms of web technology and Open Web
standards, which no plugin is, no matter of how it's implemented and
which license its code is under.

Robert Kaiser

[goue...@orange.fr]

You confirm the Mozilla Foundation is ready to prevent the use of free open source plugins because it does not respect its definition of the Open Web. I thought it would support (or at least it wouldn't prevent the use of) free open source technologies, I was naive, sorry for the waste of time.

> Message du 05/07/12 15:37

> De : "Robert Kaiser"
> A : mozilla...@lists.mozilla.org
> Copie à :
> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment
>

[Andreas Gal]

Java is today not a relevant part of the web stack any more (most people would argue that it never has been). JavaScript now routinely achieves performance en par with Java, and in case of Android/Dalvik often exceeds Java's performance. We don't support Java in B2G because frankly nobody really cares. That doesn't mean we are trying to stop anyone. The Gecko engine in B2G supports plugins, and you are welcome to create a phone based on B2G that exposes plugins to the web as its the case on the desktop. The effort for that is pretty minimal. We won't be doing that for the devices we are currently involved with, but you are more than welcome to make different decisions in products you build based on the B2G source. Thats what open source is really all about.

Andreas

[Robert Kaiser]

goue...@orange.fr schrieb:

> You confirm the Mozilla Foundation is ready to prevent the use of free open source plugins because it does not respect its definition of the Open Web. I thought it would support (or at least it wouldn't prevent the use of) free open source technologies, I was naive, sorry for the waste of time.

Well, this is my personal opinion, I cannot speak for either the Mozilla
project or Foundation.

Robert Kaiser

[goue...@orange.fr]

WebGL displays 2 frames per second even with an Nvidia Quadro 5000 able to treat 950 millions of triangles per second on my machine at work for a simple teapot and Android DVM is still far from JavaSE For Embedded in terms of memory footprint and speed. Sorry but it was already possible to show a teapot faster than WebGL in software rendering with Java in 1995, it is obviously faster with hardware rendering through JOGL. The whole Java ecosystem has been built after more than a decade of work. Javascript does not achieve performance on par with Java on all machines I tested, especially under GNU Linux. I hope Javascript will become faster, I hope we won't need really proprietary plugins to play videos in some years but you have to face the truth, there are still a lot of efforts to do.

Please correct me if I'm wrong. Do you mean that Mozilla won't ship any Java plugin and won't allow the installation of Java as a plugin in Firefox OS but won't prevent people from providing custom builds with Java support? It is better than nothing but it is not satisfying. Best regards.


> Message du 05/07/12 16:13
> De : "Andreas Gal"
> A : goue...@orange.fr
> Copie à : mozilla...@lists.mozilla.org, "RobertKaiser"

> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment
>
>

> Java is today not a relevant part of the web stack any more (most people would argue that it never has been). JavaScript now routinely achieves performance en par with Java, and in case of Android/Dalvik often exceeds Java's performance. We don't support Java in B2G because frankly nobody really cares. That doesn't mean we are trying to stop anyone. The Gecko engine in B2G supports plugins, and you are welcome to create a phone based on B2G that exposes plugins to the web as its the case on the desktop. The effort for that is pretty minimal. We won't be doing that for the devices we are currently involved with, but you are more than welcome to make different decisions in products you build based on the B2G source. Thats what open source is really all about.
>
> Andreas
>
> On Jul 5, 2012, at 7:04 AM, goue...@orange.fr wrote:
>

> > You confirm the Mozilla Foundation is ready to prevent the use of free open source plugins because it does not respect its definition of the Open Web. I thought it would support (or at least it wouldn't prevent the use of) free open source technologies, I was naive, sorry for the waste of time.
> >

[Andreas Gal]

On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:10 AM, goue...@orange.fr wrote:

> WebGL displays 2 frames per second even with an Nvidia Quadro 5000 able to treat 950 millions of triangles per second on my machine at work for a simple teapot and Android DVM is still far from JavaSE For Embedded in terms of memory footprint and speed. Sorry but it was already possible to show a teapot faster than WebGL in software rendering with Java in 1995, it is obviously faster with hardware rendering through JOGL.

WebGL is a thin layer over OpenGL. WebGL and OpenGL performance are conceptually roughly the same. JavaScript often gets within 2x of native performance, depending on the specific benchmark. As an example of today's JS and WebGL performance, take a look at BananaBread, which is a C++ OpenGL game engine cross-compiled to JS and WebGL. It uses complex 3D scenes and shaders and I get 30-60FPS on my MacBook Pro with Firefox Nightly. The code is not even optimized. Its simply translated from C++ to JavaScript using emscripten.

http://www.syntensity.com/static/night8/index.html

> The whole Java ecosystem has been built after more than a decade of work. Javascript does not achieve performance on par with Java on all machines I tested, especially under GNU Linux. I hope Javascript will become faster, I hope we won't need really proprietary plugins to play videos in some years but you have to face the truth, there are still a lot of efforts to do.
>
> Please correct me if I'm wrong. Do you mean that Mozilla won't ship any Java plugin and won't allow the installation of Java as a plugin in Firefox OS but won't prevent people from providing custom builds with Java support? It is better than nothing but it is not satisfying. Best regards.

We are not disallowing anyone anything, and I think several people have explained that to you by now. We are simply not investing engineering resources in supporting Java or plugins in B2G. Its not important to our users. You are welcome to do so if its important to your users. Thats how open source works.

Andreas

[Robert Kaiser]

goue...@orange.fr schrieb:

> WebGL displays 2 frames per second

Note that this depends a lot on both your drivers and other graphics
stack and also on the fact that Mozilla software on desktop Linux is not
using hardware acceleration right now - while on Android and on B2G we
definitely are using that, which improves speed dramatically.

Robert Kaiser

[goue...@orange.fr]

I was not joking. I expected WebGL from being more or less as fast as JOGL which is a Java binding for the OpenGL API but on lots of machines under GNU Linux and Mozilla Firefox 12, the framerate is still very low even when enabling native-gl, I tested official demos made by Google and Apple, the Angeles demo for example. There is really something wrong.

Will plugins be allowed? Will an end user have to install a "custom" version of B2G to get Java? That's what I don't understand.

> Message du 05/07/12 17:22

> De : "Andreas Gal"
> A : goue...@orange.fr
> Copie à : mozilla...@lists.mozilla.org, "RobertKaiser"
> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment
>
>

> [ smime.p7s (6.4 Ko) ]

[Andreas Gal]

On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:34 AM, goue...@orange.fr wrote:

> I was not joking. I expected WebGL from being more or less as fast as JOGL which is a Java binding for the OpenGL API but on lots of machines under GNU Linux and Mozilla Firefox 12, the framerate is still very low even when enabling native-gl, I tested official demos made by Google and Apple, the Angeles demo for example. There is really something wrong.
>
> Will plugins be allowed? Will an end user have to install a "custom" version of B2G to get Java? That's what I don't understand.

We are not working on or testing plugin support in B2G. We are not aware of any plugin vendor interested in making plugins for B2G or any other mobile platform. If you want Java support on the mobile web, you have to ensure support for plugins in the browser engines (for B2G you can do that, its open source), and create a Java plugin for mobile (for B2G you can do that as well, based on OpenJDK). You are free to do all of this. We won't, because our users don't need it. I hope this answers your question because its about as clear as I can phrase it.

Andreas

[goue...@orange.fr]

Ok. Now it is clear. I fear the implementation of plugin support in browser engines go beyond my skills but I will talk about that to other JogAmp contributors.

> Message du 05/07/12 17:39

> De : "Andreas Gal"
> A : goue...@orange.fr
> Copie à : mozilla...@lists.mozilla.org, "RobertKaiser"
> Objet : Re: [b2g] programming languages *other* than "javascript" as the basis for applications in the Firefox OS environment
>
>

> [ smime.p7s (6.4 Ko) ]

[Gervase Markham]

On 05/07/12 16:39, Andreas Gal wrote:
> We are not working on or testing plugin support in B2G. We are not
> aware of any plugin vendor interested in making plugins for B2G or
> any other mobile platform. If you want Java support on the mobile
> web, you have to ensure support for plugins in the browser engines
> (for B2G you can do that, its open source), and create a Java plugin
> for mobile (for B2G you can do that as well, based on OpenJDK). You
> are free to do all of this. We won't, because our users don't need
> it. I hope this answers your question because its about as clear as I
> can phrase it.

To make it even clearer: "You are free to do all this... but we are not
interested in shipping it on any phones we have anything to do with. So
even if you write a patch, we _might_ take it into the tree, but we
won't be enabling it for B2G phones we are involved with."

I hope that's what Andreas is saying!

Gerv