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The best reason to learn AS3.0

Posted: 02/11/07

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With CS3 shipping and Flash Player 9 stats into the 90s, more and more seasoned Flash designers and developers are making the decision to take the leap and learn ActionScript 3.0. The range of experience is broad, with some only comfortable with timeline-based scripting; others with strong ability in creating object-oriented Flash apps.

Some of the less experienced ActionScript coders will probably be asking themselves what their motivation is for learning the new language. Peer-pressure and a fear of dropping behind the pack feature highly; however, there's a feeling that the whole learning exercise will make little difference to what they do on a day-to-day basis. In actual fact, some of the changes in AS3.0 make it seemingly more difficult for them to achieve the exact same thing they were doing for years in AS2. Also, the new Flash Player remains backwards compatible with all versions of Flash, so it's not like the small animations and applications they create have an expiry date. Armed with that knowledge, where's the motivation to for these guys to migrate?

The answer lies in ActionScript's intentional convergence with strict ECMAScript standards and the open-source Tamarin project. Tamarin sees Adobe and Mozilla collaborating to define a model for JavaScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 and any other ECMAScript compliant language, and provide them with a 'unified' interface. The ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2), that made its debut inside the Flash Player 9 run-time, has been donated to Mozilla to be used as the basis for the virtual machine in future versions of the Firefox browser.

So what does this mean? Basically, ActionScript and JavaScript are going to converge to the degree that not only are they're syntactically identical and code is interchangeable; but they'll be able to communicate using native data-types common to both. In learning ActionScript 3.0, a developer not only prepares themselves for the evolution of the Flash platform, but also ends-up gaining the knowledge required to program ECMAScript 4 (i.e. JavaScript 2.0) applications as a by-product. Two for the price of one!

The Tamarin Project

Keywords for this post: tamarin, actionscript 3, mozilla, javascript, flash player, adobe