Learning Flash 9

This week I switched from Flash 8 to Flash 9.

Since last year I've
been playing
with Flash 8, using the Motion-Twin command-line
compiler mtasc. I was using it to write a transportation game, and I had something running and was making progress, until Supreme Commander came out. Then I went back to playing games instead of writing them. Although I'd still like to work on that game, I've found that I also want to use Flash to build interactive demonstrations of concepts I describe on my site. For example, in my article about grids I'd like to make those diagrams interactive so that you can better see how the coordinate systems work. Diagrams are now what I'm using to learn Flash; I may go back to the game later (or maybe not).

I like mtasc. However, it only supports Flash 8
(Actionscript 2), and is not going to be updated for Flash 9
(Actionscript 3). It's a dead end. Flash 9 is not only
significantly faster
(almost as fast as Java), but it also has major changes to the
libraries. Instead of mtasc, you can
use HaXe, which is a new language
similar to Actionscript/Javascript/ECMAscript. HaXe looks neat
(better types, type inference), but it's a different language, not
Actionscript. Part of my goal is to publish my source code so that
others can use it, and it's less useful to publish code that isn't
usable in Actionscript. It's also less useful to publish code that
requires an expensive development environment (for example, Flex, at
$500). And it's easier to learn a language when there are lots of other users, posting tips. So I've been staying with mtasc; the same code
works with both mtasc and the Flash 8 development
environment.

Last week Rich Collins
pointed me to the free command-line Flash 9
compiler, mxmlc. Wonderful! It's free, it's Flash 9,
it's command line—just what I was looking for. I spent a few days
learning about Flash 9, and
found this
tutorial and these tips to be most helpful. My initial thoughts:

• (yay) Flash 9 has much better libraries than Flash 8. The
  sprites (movieclips), the event handling, and the graphics commands
  are all nicer.


• (boo) Actionscript 3 is more verbose than Actionscript 2, with
  types, packages, public, override, and
  other annotations. It's less of a scripting language and more like
  Java. This is bad.


• (yay) Flash 9 is much faster than Flash 8, in part thanks to all
  those type annotations.


• (boo) The mxmlc compiler is significantly slower
  than mtasc, in part because it's written in Java, which
  has a high startup time.


• (boo) The mxmlc compiler is not open source.

I've been converting some of my code from Flash 8 to Flash 9, and
despite the increased verbosity, I've been happy with it. If you want to use
Flash 9 with free command-line compiler, start with this
tutorial.

Update: [2007-07-28] [2010-03-25] You can download the Flash command-line compiler (Flex mxmlc) for free, without registration, from Adobe. Once I learned the language, the Flash 9 library reference became my #1 source of information.