Uh-Oh, ActionScript 3.0

You can read the details here.

It sounds like Macromedia/Adobe is going to roll out the new ActionScript along with Flex 2. There will not be an upgrade for the Flash 8 IDE to support AS 3.0. Instead, it will be part of Flash 9. So the bad news for developers is that they may have to shell out the big bucks (~$1000) for Flex 2 in order to get started with AS 3.0.

It's not all bad news for developers, though. First of all, I'm sure the OSFlash community will be all over AS3. And hopfully MTASC support will arrive soon enough. Just another reason to get comfortable with open source tools now!

Since I work with both Flash and JavaScript, I really get to experience two extremes in programming language evolution. JavaScript for the web, is stuck because legacy browser support is still so critical. Some JavaScript 2.0 proposals have been made over the last few years, but no new standards have been adopted. So at this point JavaScript developers are saddled with a 10-year-old language.

On the other hand, new versions of ActionScript bring with them some headaches, but also lots of cool new features. It's certainly nice not to have to use prototype anymore. From the article, here's a tease about some of the new features:

ActionScript 3.0 features a compilation mode for stronger compile-time type checking that provides the benefits of languages such as Java or C#. It supports new features to streamline data manipulation, including the E4X (ECMAScript for XML) standard, which extends the language and adds XML as a native data type allowing developers to more naturally interact with and manipulate XML. It adds regular expressions support for better text parsing and processing. It sheds some of the ad hoc event handling schemes in the old virtual machine in favor of a unified model based on the W3C DOM Events standard. And it has significantly updated APIs aimed at the application developer audience.

Regexp will be nice to have (but is already available through 3rd party plugins). Better type-checking is great, but MTASC already has filled in this gap to some extent. The new APIs and DOM integration are potentially huge, but from this description, it's difficult to tell exactly what it means.

Here's the most important part of the article, though:

To ensure that we meet your needs, we will soon release a public alpha version of Flash Player 8.5, Flex Framework 2, and Flex Builder 2. An alpha of Flex Enterprise Services 2.0 will follow. This, the earliest public release ever of a Macromedia product, also signals a change to our development process and relationship with our community. We decided to make alpha 1 publicly available despite the fact that it is early in the development cycle and still has some incomplete features. Our goal in providing access at this stage is to get feedback so we can make refinements and course corrections to ensure that you can efficiently build the most immersive application experiences with the Flex 2 product line.

Well, why haven't you signed up yet?