Well, as an Actionscript freak… Atm, I’m kinda asking myself if AS3 is really worth it.
I mean it is SO much longer to write! Sure, it is WAY better performance-wise and thus can do much more. But does it really surpass AS2 overall.
To be honest, I’m not sure. AS3 probably won’t be what I would use to make a flash website or a normal game. I would probably only use it for advanced 3D games as the trouble isn’t really worth the performance gain in most cases.
The main problem regarding the performance gain isn’t so much the “import flash.package.class” we have to put at the front… But all these class files which are literally compulsory in AS3 take a while to make. Sure, you can re-use the class later on. But there are SO many to write-up in the first place!
The fact that most flash applications on the web are managing the performance just fine. I think that AS3 is more of a stand-along with AS2 rather than a complete replacement. I mean… When AS2 first came along. You would have been a fool to stay with AS1 as both languages were just as convenient development-wise and AS2 had more functionality.
I have learned AS3 and I appreciate what it can do. It is a follow-up of AS2 so you don’t really have to learn it all over again but it’s not the most convenient language.
I think the Adobe team should enable some features from the previous flash version like the “linkage ID” for fast development as an option in the object property dialog box. I don’t like the way it’s forcing us to use classes all the time… Even when we don’t need to. Some functions like “loadBitmap” should never have been deprecated. I don’t like having to make a whole class file just to get my bitmap pasted on the screen.
Yes AS3 can deliver awesome results to the user… But is it really worth the trouble it’s going to cause the average web/multimedia developer? And since it won’t really improve the creativity of developers… Is it giving developers difficulties for headroom which most would never reach or need to reach?
That’s about all I have to say.
What do you think?
Don’t get me wrong. I would upgrade to flash 9 once it comes out even as is. But I would really be missing some of the features from the previous version. It isn’t too good… When AS2 came out I did miss some properties/methods/function names from AS1, but the I didn’t look back at the core functionality because AS2 was clearly better.