Advice on GUI components for AS2/mtasc project

Hi all

I’m working on a visualisation tool to understand political relationships, and back at the tail end of 2009 picked up a dusty copy of Flash 6 to create a prototype. Some months later I converted my AS1 code to AS2, and started using the open-source Mtasc compiler (which is great, btw). My code is not yet F/OSS but is expected to be in due course; it’s [URL=“http://code.activistlab.org.uk/relations/browser/trunk”]here if anyone cares to take a look.

The code has now grown to over 3000 lines, and the prototype works fairly well. The GUI components are designed in Flash, but I’d like to use an open-source equivalent. I am playing with AsWing*; the components in that framework are very good, but they won’t compile with the mtasc --strict option.

I can write my UI stuff and compile it into the swf without --strict, and then add the relevant classes to an exceptions file. Then I believe the bulk of the project, which is separated from the UI, can be compiled into the same swf with --strict. Has anyone got this to work? I don’t want to sink a lot of dev time into something that won’t work, and I’ve found some of the AsWing stuff a bit fiddly.

I am happy to stick with AS2 if needs be as I like working with it, but I believe the AS3/F9+ engine has some performance improvements that are hard to ignore. I appreciate also that AS2 is somewhat outdated! Also, Flex has some great F/OSS GUI components that are right up-to-date, and AS2 appears to struggle in this area - I want my whole project to compile using free/open-source products. I have never touched Flex, but it does appear to be much more complicated than AS2; would any Flex experts care to estimate whether converting would be an easy task?

Thanks for any pointers/advice that anyone can give!

Edit: * the AsWing changes have not been committed to svn yet.