ReactionScript3

It seems like the Flash community have been reacting very strongly to a collection of articles on both the current state and future of ActionScript 3 this past week.

Pros & Cons

On the one hand we’ve got people arguing that AS3 development is more verbose than AS2 and therefore slower to code, there’s a complicated learning curve, and a plethora of ignorance from Adobe as far as acknowledging and fixing shortcomings and bugs with AS3. Meanwhile on the positive side, people have been defending how much better the object oriented approach to AS3 has enriched Flash development, especially with its similarities to JAVA development, and how much faster, lighter and more powerful AS3 is compared to AS2.

One thing seems clear – AS3 is here to stay whether it’s perfect or not, and AS2 will continue to fade away. So the sooner the switch is made to AS3, the better. But just how open will Adobe be to not only listening to the community’s feedback, but by addressing those concerns?

The Flash Community Have Spoken

Here are some arguments both for and against AS3 that are currently being aired in the Flash community that make interesting reading. Have a read and then let us know in the comments how you feel about the state of ActionScript 3 and how you think Adobe could make future improvements:

Making the Case for ActionScript by Peter Elst

Is a focus on how to do things ‘properly’ holding us back getting things done? I believe so. Is there anything now – excluding improvements to Flash Player performance – that could not have been done with ActionScript 1.0? Very little, though admittedly it now takes a lot less effort. Improving the language is one thing but it shouldn’t impede on what actually matters, the user. Innovation in the Flash Platform is primarily driven by creativity rather than the feature set of the tools you are given.

I would like to see Adobe focus primarily on the following core areas for the Flash Player: performance, multi-threading, hardware acceleration, compiler optimization. I think the current focus on object-oriented orthodoxy in the community and evolving the language is not necessarily the right approach. Moving further away from at least the option of dynamically typed languages and simple constructs, we now celebrate having something like

navigateToURL(new URLRequest("http://www.peterelst.com"));

over

getURL("http://www.peterelst.com");

The Failure of AS3 by Nicolas Cannasse

(Author/Creator of the haXe multiplatform language.)

With the release of Flash CS3 Pro in April 2007, (and) now, more than two years later, it’s maybe time to check if AS3 was a success, or a failure. One of the (original) promises of AS3 was to get out of the whole “proprietary language” thing. Two years later, ActionScript3 is still a proprietary language, which evolution and control is entirely in the hands of Adobe. One of the areas where AS3 is definitely better than AS2 is speed: performances were greatly improved, and that’s a very good thing. However, in terms of usability, there was a lot of complaints of “old school” Flashers that had to write much more code in AS3 than in AS2 just to do exactly the same thing. I’m playing the devil advocate of course – but could someone explain me the advantage of writing the following in AS3:

mc.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,function(e:MouseEvent) {
});

Against the following equivalent in AS2 ?

mc.onClick = function() {
}

Oh, I can hear you : listeners are very powerful, you can add several of them on the same object ! Right… But how much probability do you have to need several click handlers on the same MovieClip ? Maybe one every hundred ? Or did you EVER need that ? I’m not paid for programming on a per-line-of-code salary, I want simple things to be simple to write as well. In terms of API design, IMHO AS3 went the wrong way : instead of making things that you write often be simple, the API gives you the power to make complex things, but simple things become very difficult and painful to write.

I personally think that especially in the programming language design area – where I’m the most active – AS3 is a failure : it brings too much strict OO principles to satisfy people that prefer “scripting” procedural languages such as AS1/2, but fail to deliver in expressiveness for people that want actual features in that area. AS3 is sick of the want-to-be-Java disease, and that’s not one that you can easily cure.

Sadly, I don’t think that AS3 can be fixed, or it might take years. Adobe has other priorities than listening to perfectionists developers, and they are masses of Flash customers out there that just don’t care at all, maybe because they do programming only as a job without any notion of pleasure inside it.

This is an outrage! by Joa Ebert

I have criticised Adobe in the past for a lot of reasons. Not because I do not like them or the technologies they produce but because I want to improve the Flash Platform. It seems like the future of the Flash Platform is defined in some conference room in some Adobe office.

There is always a way to make things better. I want to split them in three parts.

Contributing

Contributing to the SDK and to the Flash Player is a great option and I am thankful for having it. But this includes also contributing to the Flash Platform with tools.

• Extend the opensource Wiki for up-to-date specifications and allow people to contribute to them.
• Create an open ActionScript documentation.
• Do not develop something closed source to open it six months later like the TextLayoutFramework.
• Create a progress for code reviews and allow people to contribute without having to go through JIRA hell.
• Make a roadmap available so developers know what happens inside Adobe.

Language

To be honest no rational human being could say that ActionScript 3 (aka Flash) is superior to C# (aka Silverlight). Although love is not always rational of course. But in order to stay competitive here is my masterplan.

• Add support for generics.
• True method overloading.
• Threading support has to be implemented including synchronization features.
• Rethink the const keyword which is currently completly unusable.
• Implement standard OOP features like private constructors, abstract methods and classes.
• Create a collection framework making use of genercics.
• Create a robust concurrency framework.

Performance

Google’s V8 is getting faster and faster. Once JavaScript performance is better than ActionScript 3 it becomes ridiculous.

• Improve the VM performance especially for object allocation and method calls.
• A tracing JIT would be great, hotspot would be fantastic.
• Improve the performance of the compiler and its produced output.

I just hope someone at Adobe will read this post and understand how frustrating it is to develop such programs and to fix some stuff when not sitting right next to the product manager. Hopefully something changes.

AS3 Failure? by Andre Michelle

Every new Flash version extended my tool kit and I spent a lot of fun-time with the new toys. The only thing that annoyed me was that Actionscript was the slowest language thinkable. That all changed in 2005 with Actionscript 3.0, which I am very thankful for. Actionscript 3.0 came with some stunning new features like dealing with bytes on the lowest level, manipulating the display-list in runtime without destroying the DisplayObjects and the fastest language in the Flashplayer since then. And with Flash10, my dream of dynamic audio programming came true.

Actionscript is not solely a scripting language to extend your timeline compositing. Several projects are out there that rely entirely on Actionscript, including our little baby, the Hobnox AudioTool. We are doing exactly what Adobe were hoping for. We create a rich internet application (RIA), based on the Flash Player. That requires a lot of work and a lot of trust in the company that build the Flash Player and its language. So far we have a lot of problems to solve. I want to amplify every single issue/problem without repeating them.

Native Event System

The native Flashplayer event system is too complicated. Many people get lost in adding listeners to several events. This all leads to a unstable system, that is likely to throw some Null-Exceptions, when you forget something important that just pleases the system, the Flash Player provides.

Custom Mouse Cursor

Since Mouse.hide and Mouse.show provides hiding the system cursor, people think that it is possible to attach a DisplayObject at the same position, creating this way a custom system MouseCursor. Well this is not entirely true. The visual update rate of the Flash Player is different than the OS rate (updateAfterEvent doesn’t help), so they might often be an offset between the system mouse position and the DisplayObject position. It simply doesn’t feel very good, especially on lower FPS. Flash 10 provides a very tiny set of new cursors, which amount is not satisfying. If you want to create RIA, you need a solid set of cursors like Zoom, Resizing, Busy and even custom BitmapData for special cases.

Keyboard support

Dealing with keyboard events is hell, especially when trying to add control keys like CTRL and ALT. But this is very important in software, where you want to provide shortcuts for faster document editing. It reacts different on every OS, sometimes on different computes with the same OS.

Flash Player 11

All we know is that Adobe is focusing on mobile. I am personally not interested in mobile programming, since I like to have space for the user interface. However I see that there is a market for the Flash Player and time will tell if the Flash Player gets highly distributed on mobile devices.

However, has this stopped the big picture of Flash itself? A creative, media, runtime environment to create websites, games, applications, experiments and actually everything on any platform? I am afraid that resources at Adobe have moved to mobile development and nobody is thinking (about) or already developing for Flash Player 11. My biggest wish for FP11 is that it will be more reliable according to its language and existing features. Actionscript 3.0 is not a failure in my opinion, but it needs more enhancements to make it, what it supposed to be. A creative toolkit to compete with existing languages.

Adobe Are Listening

While the debate over AS3 ensues, it would appear that Adobe are more open than ever to hearing user’s feedback. A couple of weeks ago we reported that Lee Brimelow invited the Flash community to ask any questions you always wanted to know about Adobe and last week we noticed that another Adobe Platform Evangelist, Ted Patrick, requested comments and feedback about defining the future of Flash. So once all is said and done, and the community have made their voice known, it will be very interesting to see and hear what Adobe do to answer everyone’s comments, suggestions, and constructive feedback.

Scott

Scott is the Down the FoxHole blog editor. He is also a reviewer for ActiveDen. Scott is a freelance Web and Interactive Media Designer having previously worked as the Lead Web Designer for a well-known children's hospital in the US for 8 years. Follow him on Twitter @scottwills

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