At the moment Adobe is lending both manpower and knowledgde to the open-source project called Tamarin. Tamarin is an attempt of creating a new OO-based JavaScript 2.0 standard up and running. Since both JS2.0 and Actionscript will be based on the ECMA-262-v4 standard it’s easy to understands Adobe’s “goodwill” regarding this project. (Erh… future incorporation of whole or part of Flash Player (AVM2) into browsers, for instance)
However, Tamarin is a joint venture by Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Opera etc and will likely pass as the future standard for the long awaited JS2.0 standard. Tamarin will be licenced under GPL, which means free use without modification.
Tamarin will be deployed in Firefox and SpiderMonkey as of autumn 2008, and the rest will follow.
Further reading: Tamarin FAQ
T:)
…but Director wasn't dead!
Everybody has written Director off for the past two years. “It’s dead and buried” we’ve been chanting. Well then, prepare for a miracle, because Director has arissen from the dead and has just been re-launched in a version 11.
Features include support for all known and unknown media formats (videos, images and audio), a brand new 3D engine with physics subsets, Lingo is “gone” and replaced with JavaScript as main scripting language, text-renderer, a brand new interface and of course a vast selection of new Xtras (plugins).
Director 11 is not a competitor to Flash due to the lower penetration of the ShockWave plugin (4,5 MB). However, it sails ut as a competitor to AIR, and a serious one as many of the new Xtras are certified with Vista and OSX. Many of the new Xtras have capabilities far beyond the AIR environment.
Adobe is pinpointing the game-industry as well as the traditional video and e-learning markets with this new release. Personally I see it as an actor on the application-market for specialized task-applications as well.
Check it out here.