Action Script Grows Up
Adobe’s Action Script Three is more than an improvement over the previous version. It has all the power of the best OOP techniques, making it far easier and quicker to accomplish exploiting Flash. In short, it is, for us at least, an enabling tool that opens new possibilities.
One of Flex’s advantages is the action script that it supports. Action script three, the latest version, is a gigantic improvement over version two, which always struck us as something cobbled together by rank amateurs. It certainly has more crooks and crannies than Basic, visual or otherwise. Being an integrated part of Flash wasn’t a problem, but the workflow and logical organization had more to do with exception processing than getting things done simply, quickly and reliabily. We passed on a number of projects because, frankly, we had more profitable opportunities that didn’t require the often convoluted language constructs are needed to do anything beyond dirt simple.
Action script three is, of course, based on the latest ECMA specification, making it C-like and akin to things like javascript, and java itself. That it requires its own virtual machine isn’t a problem; even C# (what java could have been) is interpreted through the .NET environment. In action script three’s case, the virtual machine is certainly not an issue, as it is part of the Flash engine, with a larger installed base than all the other contenders combined.
Action script three’s consistent OOP model brings all the benefits long enjoyed by industrial grade programming, not least being code reusability. That alone is worth the switch away from the previous version, but wait! There’s more! That being nothing less than it’s now easier to do interesting and powerful things that go far beyond the graphical design environment of the language’s roots.
Adobe has done a reasonable job in documentation support, but like all such efforts, there’s always room for improvement, which always creates a secondary market for technical books. One the better of these is the Action Script 3 Bible, by Roger Braunstein et al. The first two, possibly three, parts of the book are required for beginners, but the remaining parts are great reference sections.
There’s nothing that we’d change in the language, although most of the tools leave something to be desired. They have the same problem as most of the relatively recent programming languages: Too much typity-typity, even with some tools’ code completion builders. We’ve been spoiled by Delphi’s VCL, with real visual programming, which would help because most of Action Script Three’s objects are non visual. Even something like Altova’s MapForce design tool would eliminate a lot of the clerk typist work that developers have to deal with.
For us, AS3 is opening new possibilities for Flex and Flash projects, by building IP assets instead of jury rigging spaghetti code.
© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG
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Tags: action script three, as3, ecma, Flash, flex, industrial grade programming, object programming