ActionScript 3 tutorials

Draft

Actionscript 3, the programming language shared by Flash and Flex

This pages is for actionscript concepts that apply to any ActionScript 3.0 authoring environment and any runtime that supports ActionScript 3.0. For the moment, two authoring environment are covered in this wiki, Adobe Flash CS3 and Adobe Flex. The focus is on programming concepts rather than tool-specific topics.

Disclaimer

We write these pages as (recent) learners of the language. We are not expert.

Overview

ActionScript 3.0 is an object-oriented language for creating applications and media-content that can then be played back in Flash client runtimes (typically the Adobe Flash Player, more recently the AIR framework).

For those used already familiar with a Flash authoring environment, it needs to be mentioned that quite important changes have been introduced in the ActionScript language between version 2 and version 3. Version 2 was somehow a scripting language targeted at unexperienced programmers. Version 3 has all characteristics of any core programming language used by experienced programmer.

This may make it slightly more difficult for complete beginners to jump in. These changes, however, don't prevent a person who would have never programmed before to learn the language. This is in part because the authoring environment let you define content and basic actions without having to care about code. Progressive learning can take place. The benefits of the changes introduced in version 3 far outweight any possible cost.

Two main aspects of the language:

1. AS3 is a strongly typed language. This means that whenever you use a variable, you must provide information about the type of data that this variable is expected to hold. If you want to use a counter and keep track of the counter progress in a variable, the type of data to be held in this variable will be of integer type (non negative numbers). To define that counter variable in AS3, you will type something like

var counter:int = 0;

1. AS3 is an object oriented language. This means that you have the possibility to split your code into specialized classes rather than write a single program of 3,000 lines of code. This contributes to make the code easier to maintain and easier to re-use. You can then design specialized components that will be re-used across different applications. A typical example of such a component would be a calendar object that pops up to let you specify a date. The problem then, for a total newbie, is that the use of class is not optional. *Everything* needs to be organized into classes. You must have at least one class in your program. This can appear quite obscure at first. But because the class definition always uses the same format, that's simply a question of getting use to it. It won't take more than a week to get used to it.

// The class definition
public class Game {
   // instance variable of type integer
   var score:int

  // The constructor method
   public function Game () {
         // code that initialize Game instances
   }
   
  // instance method
   public function updateScore ():void {
       // code to execute when updateScore () is invoked
   }

EcmaScript Specification

ActionScript 3.0 is based on the EcmaScript 4th edition language specification. This specification can be viewed on the wiki of the Ecmascript Organisation. That specification also forms the chore of the Javascript 2.0 language contributed by the Mozilla foundation (see tamarin project at Mozilla.org).

Related pages

• Flash ActionScript 3 overview
• ActionScript 3 event handling tutorial
• ActionScript 3 interactive objects tutorial