Mizblog

For the last few weeks I’ve been learning Actionscript 3. For those of you who don’t know what that is, I’ll tell you: Actionscript is a scripting language used by Adobe (and previously by Macromedia) to control things in Flash movies. Actionscript 3 (AS3) is the latest version of Actionscript, and it’s a complete rewrite.

Learning a new language is a difficult task. Fortunately, much of AS3 is the same as AS2, which I learned last year. Unfortunately, almost all of the parts of AS2 that I hacked my way through to design and implement a PLM client framework last year were the same parts that were rewritten, changed, or scrapped in AS3. XML handling is different. Event distribution and handling is different. Display management and interactivity is different. So I had to learn all the new stuff and then figure out how to rethink my hacks into the way AS3 lets you do things.

It’s coming together now, in the 4th week of the process, and it’s really a lot cleaner than it used to be. It uses about half the code to get the job done, since the new tools built into AS3 take some of the burden off of the PLM. I just can’t wait for this thing to be finally working! I’m going to go back and hammer on it some more now…