Eric Feminella

I got some insider info on the official release of FLEX 2.0 beta. My company is partners with Macromedia so luckily for my team and I we have access to the Beta section of Macromedia.com and all pre-release betas so I plan to spend most of my weekend in Flex 2.0. The new beta will be available for download soon. How soon I don’t know specifically but I have been told that I will have access to it very soon. I’ll write more as this develops.

I have been experimenting with some alternative IDE’s for compiling Flash content. One alternative that is definetly worth taking a look at is MTASC, which is a commandline compiler and also happens to be the first ActionScript 2.0 Open Source compiler. Check it out at: http://www.mtasc.org.

You can use MTASC in Sepy for syntax checking and compiling. Sepy is extreamly useful as I was using it for awhile a few months back and just recently started using it again. Check it out at www.sephiroth.it.

Also, be sure to check out FDT

These past few weeks I have been building applications leveraging the Flash Platform as a whole – Flash, Flex and ActionScript. I have been spending the majority of my time at work in Flex Builde working with mxml, and ActionScript 2.0 of course.

In short, I am very excited about the upcoming release of ActionScript 3.0 in Flex 2.0 as well as Flash Player 9, due to be released this spring.

I am quite sure the majority of readers who are Flash Platform Developers are familiar with parsing XML documents in ActionScript 2.0. And though it is fun to do and most of us already have plenty of AS 2.0 parsing utilities such as XMLSA, in reality it is quite cumbersome to say the least.

Welcome to E4X, quite simply ECMAScript for XML (E4X), and in my opinion this is the what has been needed all along. I have written many APIs which convert XML objects to strongly type data structures, similar in some ways to how mxml is converted to native ActionScript objects at compiletime in Flex. This may be appropriate for certain applications but when it comes to just parsing a document E4X makes much more since. What E4X does is incredibly simple and logical. Since the XML document is contained inside an XML object you then have access to all of it’s properties, which are nothing more than the documents nodes, attributes, namespaces etc.

ActionScript 3.0 will have support for this new standard which we can take advantage of without having to worry about the limitations of most browsers at the moment since none of the mainstream browsers are currently supporting E4X. Check out www.ecma-international.org to learn more.