Comments on: ActionScript 4 feature request: interfaces with events

By: Joshua

Joshua — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:04:09 +0000

I would rather take FlashDevelop as a development environment than Visual Studio any day. Intellisense is not exclusive to Visual Studio.

By: rob

rob — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 18:22:36 +0000

Er… I just got off of a Silverlight project, using VisualStudio 2008 and I couldn’t disagree more. Granted, C# is a more robust language than AS3, but there were some major problems with application development. Perhaps you haven’t worked with with Flex before, but VS with Silverlight is dreadful in comparison. I found the error messages to be, at times, completely devoid of useful information. Intellisense is okay, however you run into some hurdles if you don’t already know the namespace of the class you want to use and already have it in the class since intellisense is completely ignorant of what is available. The dependency properties are obtuse and difficult to work with (intellisense is little help if any in this regard) and there isn’t a clear and robust way for you to communicate with the code behind from xaml. All this is made even worse by the horrific state of the documentation, which was useless half the time I tried to look something up. I certainly don’t think VisualStudio can boast any grace in comparison to FlexBuilder. Silverlight also seems to be more cumbersome at runtime, grinding through tasks which I have seen Flex perform efficiently. Silverlight seems to lean quite heavily on xaml, while punishing developers who try to do the same task in C#, resulting in thousands of lines of xaml code which, in addition to defining layout, which is the whole point of mark-up language, also defines functionality which can’t be efficiently ported to C#.

Silverlight is nice for .NET developers who want to get a taste of the front end, but it has a very long way to go until it is a desirable environment to develop in for people accustomed to Flex. ActionScript does need to be more robust, and Adobe is working on it, as they should. And don’t forget, there were a lot of baby steps on the way to the moon, which is a far better analogy to the development of ActionScript than I think you realize.

By: Darkrider

Darkrider — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 04:27:28 +0000

Going to reply to my Extremely brash comments above. By saying I love Flash and I will defend it to the death The masterminds behind Flash/ActionScrip are doing a great job. But dude being someone who works in both Flash and Visual Studio, the reason Silver light is going to seriously hurt Flash and Flex isn’t because of the effectiveness of Action Script… it’s because of simple tools inside the Silver Light/Blend Visual Studio Development platforms like “Intellisense” and the Runtime Complier, not letting you compile jack chit’ unless the project works 100% without failure, or Seamless Database intergration you not only can create Database and populate it but you can make and a GridView to your project and animate it on screen. you can do all this in under 10 min…granted your using 3 programs to do it but the point is your using the same debugger you’d use in Silver Light that you’d use in Blend that you’d use in Visual Studio…

So again instead of pushing actionscript even further, Let all work on making the Development Environment Better an more intuitive, more integrated with all other Adobe Development Platforms… I think then we’ll start to see big holes in Interactive Development and Adobe Products, and then when Adobe fills those holes, we won’t have anything to worry about when Silver light start to take hold.

By: Darkrider

Darkrider — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:57:38 +0000

Maybe I’ve been slow to change but you guys are talking about AS4-AS5 like it’s some kind of a roll out phase. Dude heres an idea. how about the masterminds that come up with actionscript DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME… YOU KNOW LIKE GOING TO THE MOON… YOU DO IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME… I understand a programming language evolves over time but, this is starting to feel like a “High School Science Project” with Flash and Flex development. For starters the IDE in Flash and Flex doesn’t even compare to Visual Studio in logic and in grace, not to mention Error checking is a complete joke, and the intellisence works better in my email client than it does in Flash’s code view. So I have a great idea, how about we leave leave action script alone, and let the rest of the development community catch up. And focus on making the IDE better, more intuitive, take out the redundancy in the GUI vs Code.

By: Quvet

Quvet — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 03:07:46 +0000

That feature will be available in AS5 only

By: Polaco

Polaco — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:24:40 +0000

“AS4 or the next flash platform must render on the GPU”
Doing that maybe will compromise the flash player hardware independence since it will require certain GPU hardware to work. Maybe it could check if GPU acceleration is provided and if not use the CPU… just a thought.

There is a release date for AS4?
IÂ´m just getting my hands to AS3, I would be madness if this happens so soon and in my opinon it’s a bit unrespectful from Adobe to change the language so many times in a short period of time and a weakness of the product. It will be better for them to create a robust language and then provide new functionalties but not a new sintax/semantic.

By: Andrew Paul Simmons

Andrew Paul Simmons — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 09:15:00 +0000

AS4 or the next flash platform must render on the GPU. Silverlight is coming and the best way to win the battle is to blow them away before they get started. We must get some kind of interface to the GPU.

By: Building Pet 4: Interfaces

Building Pet 4: Interfaces — Tue, 08 May 2007 17:48:28 +0000

[...] Aral Balkan has proposed that, just as AS3 allowed coders to put getter/setters into interfaces, AS4 should allow coders to put events like “ready” or “complete” inside the interface. I’ll sign up for that. Interfaces like ILoadable would be less cluttered, because they wouldn’t have to duplicate the functionality of EventDispatcher. [...]

By: LAlex

LAlex — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 10:08:39 +0000

I agree that events are a really cool and a good way to have clean code, but the way AS (and ECMA) are oriented prevent to use them as a part of the langage, and it doesn’t seem to me that it’s a must-have: events are an implementation of a coding method, but that’s all…

But it’s true that the C# event management is pretty cool, maybe ECMA should think of it? But I think it’s also an implementation, using operator overwritting…

^_^

By: aral

aral — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:37:11 +0000

Hi LAlex,

I donâ€™t really agree with that: the Flex/AS3 Framework is based on events, not the langage.

I’m not disputing this. I’m saying that the language *should* be based on events. Or, in another way, that events should be made part of the language as they are central to development in Flash and Flex application. They are as important as objects and even more so than classes (which are, after all, still a stylistic element more than anything else in an *object*-oriented language).