I have been spending the majority of my free time building sample applications in the pre-release of Flex 2.0 beta learning ActionScript 3.0.

For those of you who haven’t yet had the chance to installed the alpha of Flex 2.0, let me tell you that you are missing out on some of the best advances in RIA technology around.

ActionScript 3.0 is ideal for Object Oriented Programmers like myself to use. Definetly a step in the right direction and Macromedia / Adobe have built on the OOP nature of ActionScript 2.0 greatly.

Though different in many ways from ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 has many new features which are obviously much to vast to get into in this post but I will elaborate on what I have found so far to be the most impressive:

• Automatic code hinting for classes, packages and members of user defined classes.

• Strict datatyping

• Package definitions (You now use a package statement rather than dot notation syntax to declare classes inside packages)

• init and unit classes for whereever a decimal isn’t needed – int is great for loop counters

• public and internal access specifiers
• flash.util.Proxy (this allows you to control what happens when any member of a class is accessed

• New XML class that implements the XML for ECMAScript (E4X) functionality. No more recursive looping!

• Code collapse

• Sound.computeSpectrum() method of the sound class (this method accurately returns an array containing 512 normalized values representing the audio file that is playing. You can use these values to make an accurate EQ but even more so you can use these values to controlanimation or just about anything else that you can think of.

These are just a few of the new features that I am happy to see. There are so many new features that I will have to learn them before I can comment. Beware that there have been many changes and alot of AS2.0 methods and properties have been either changed or deprecated all together.

I will post some of my sample migration from ActionScript 2.0 to ActionScript 3.0 applications as well as the port code to my portfolio site next week.

– Eric