Actionscript

The revision of Actionscript - Flash's native language - to version 3.0, comes as an escalating shock to most like me. Though commenting on something introduced in 2006 - 3 years back - is not trendy, this is just another 2 bits from another developer on this platform (after regular cycles of attempts to 'learn it all'). It's not meant to be comprehensive.

The first thing to get straight...AS3 functionality leaves AS2 behind a light year. All the things one can do is unmatched. People are going crazy with everything it offers.

AS3.0 is heavily Object-based. In my opinion it marks a shift in the userbase, exactly an inversion from the amateur crowd that it pulled initially. Now the bigger draw is professional studios and upstarts, not the lone wolf in the basement. The lone wolf is majorly left to the brilliant vector drawing features of Flash, but giving life to it through nifty coding requires a wide learning curve.

Unifying the event listening mechanism is very nice. No longer do we need to be aware of the several ways (and several locations one can implement that) to handle a button click - now it's all done through the combination of addEventListener and a listener function. This is possible because of some heavy inheritance - the most common classes that we know of all belong to 4th or 5th generation in the flash hierarchy.

AS3.0 means that the past is dead. The past gods are dead as well - all my earlier Flash documents downloaded from tutorial pages of some of the best websites (and best coders) are junk. Publishing them as AS2.0 does no harm, though, but modifying them to your own use is hopeless.
Then there's the support pages...they can kill your aspirations. They're badly indexed, badly linked, badly written. Tutorials spread all over the web are the best thing for an AS3 developer; that is unfortunate.

Maybe this review evolves as life goes on.