Mozilla to support Python and Ruby in Firefox

Mozilla has announced that it is starting a project, IronMonkey, that will allow web pages to run Python and Ruby in exactly the same way as they can now run Javascript. For example, presently, a web page can contain a

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<script language="text/javascript"></script>

block, and the browser will run javascript inside of that block. With IronMonkey, a web page could contain a block, and run Python. The Python (or ruby) code would be able to accomplish all of the same tasks (for example, DOM manipulation, asynchronous calls like AJAX) as Javascript.

Why is this important? There are many tasks that Python and Ruby languages are just better for (faster to write, easier to maintain). Adding additional options to the web developers arsenal will allow for faster (and therefore cheaper) development, and probably make things we haven’t yet thought of possible, due to the way Javascript presently works.

IronMonkey also has a sister project, ScreamingMonkey, that is a browser plugin for other browsers (such as potentially Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and Konquerer) so they too can enjoy the world of rich, Python or Ruby driven web pages, in the future.

Could this be a serious competitor to Flex, Silverlight, and JavaFX? Personally, I hope so – I’m a big fan of being able to see the code. With in-browser scripting, I can click “View Source” in my browser, and see the code – the same cannot be said of the other technologies. And I think that has lead to a lot innovation and progress.

Finally, I should say that IronMonkey and ScreamingMonkey build off of the work of the IronPython and IronRuby projects (which ironically, are Microsoft projects – I love open source), as well as Adobe’s recently open sourced Tamarin ECMAScript 4 VM.