Eric Feminella

Adobe released Flex 2 Beta 2 today. I have been building prototype applications in Flex 2.0 / ActionScript 3.0 this past few months and the new API’s in ActionScript 3.0 are simply amazing. There is a slight learning curve as most of the core AS 2.0 classes have been repackaged and many are now considered legacy classes or deprecated. But this is a step in the right direction as AS 3 now implements the ECMA-262 specification bringing it in compliance with a well established industry standard, similar to C# and Java.

You can learn more at:

http://labs.macromedia.com/flexproductline/

Adobe has posted the draft for the official ActionScript 3.0 language specification.

For more information check out
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/actionscript3/

I am releasing all of my ActionScript 2.0 Classes to my Blog under the Codebase directory. This code is open source so long as you do not sell it to anyone. I have quite a large library of API’s which I will distribute thru this site.

I recently stumbled across a rather useful utility called ‘Net Drive’ which allows for the mapping of an ftp site to a local drive in Windows. Once configured, the mapped drive will show up in Windows Explorer just like any other mapped drive.

http://law.wustl.edu/computersupport/help/NetDrive/netdrive.htm

Today Adobe / Macromedia has officially launched the Flex 2.0 beta. I have already been using the beta for the past week prior to launch and I have found alot of improvments since the original alpha back in October. Checkout http://labs.macromedia.com/flexproductline/ to learn more.

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